16 Engineering Ethics: An Industrial Perspective
project task forward. However, depending on a result’s relationship to the
rest of the project, a manager could interpret these results as detrimental
to meeting project milestones. Regardless of possible interpretation, it is
an engineer’s responsibility to keep the engineering manager informed
in a timely manner of negative and positive results. These results should
be presented as accurately as possible, with rational discussion of possi-
ble consequences. The manager is then responsible for acting on these
results.
At least one of the space shuttle disasters could have been averted
had managers listened to their engineers (see Chapters 5 and 12). The
day before the Challenger exploded in 1986, Morton ...