Discuss how project managers can be

good leaders.
Project managers should have proper leadership skills since it is a major requirement and without a
good leader, a project is unlikely to be completed successfully.

1.Responsibility, authority and accountability

Responsibility indicates the duty assigned to a position. The person holding the position has to
perform the duty assigned. It is his responsibility and is accountable for the performance of assigned
duties. Need to ensure that tasks are being done correctly.

A manager will not be able to function efficiently without proper authority. It indicates the right and
power of making decisions, giving orders and instructions to subordinates. Authority is delegated
from above but must be accepted from below by the subordinates.

When authority is delegated to a subordinate, the person is accountable to the superior for
performance in relation to assigned duties. Accountability means that the subordinate should
explain the factors responsible for non-performance or lack of performance. It helps to manage
risks.

2. Delegation

Having a good understanding of team members allows to delegate tasks to the right individuals for
the best possible results. Team members will respond well to a manager who delegates appropriate
tasks that are well suited to their skill set and subsequently trusts them to get on with it.

3. Transparency

Transparency in leadership means keeping employees in the loop, sharing the good and the bad, and
welcoming honest feedback from the team members. All work products should be public. Project
managers and team members benefit because they make more informed decisions. Leading with
transparency helps ensure that both employee and employer expectations are appropriately set and
fulfilled. With clear, open, and frequent communication, employees are less likely to make false
assumptions about their job or their organization.

4. Team management

A good manager gets everyone on board, building core values and ensuring the whole team works
together towards a common goal. He sets standards that are fair and attainable, measure each team
member’s progress against known and agreed-upon goals and correct performance problems as
early as possible.
What are the implications of ethics in
leadership?
Ethical leadership focus on how leaders leverage power in the decisions they make, actions they
engage in and ways they influence others. Leaders are responsible for influencing followers to
perform actions, complete tasks, and behave in certain manners.

As businesses grow, leaders may become more focused on goals for profit and worry less about
ethical standards which may arise implications and later have adverse effects in the organization.

-Software project managers involved in large and mega projects have a duty and obligation under
law to keep the regulatory bodies informed and updated about the compliance or otherwise with
various environmental norms. At no stage must the project manager hide information or fudge data
regarding the compliance or otherwise with such norms. He should be transparent about all the
activities.

-Ethical issues may arise where the values of the manager and the company policies disagree.

For example, in order to keep an IT project within budget and time, a company may resort to use of
illegal copies of software package or software that does not follow the licensing rules. The
company’s use of pirated software as a standard approach to conduct their business brings about
this unethical act.

-Ethical issues may arise where company's policies that address the implications for a software
manager's failure to anticipate an error are unfair or unethical. For example, in order to meet the
deadlines the software programmers may skip on quality assurance testing and as result the quality
assurance testing misses to find the major errors in a software or major errors that are discovered
fail to be fixed because there is no time left to retest the fix. If this takes place, the company policy
may hold the project manager accountable for the mitigations of costs and effects of errors.

-Software project managers have data of their team working with them. They collect personal data
of employees. And employee data is not safeguarded and sometimes this will be harmful for an
individual. Information like personal contact, CNIC number and bank accounts of employees must be
in the hands of authorized personnel and the system that contains this information must be
completely secure but at some points these systems are leaved by project management team to be
used by other employees which is against the code of ethics.

-Software project management team is a bridge between clients and employees of a company; they
must respect their employees in order to get better results from them. But in some organizations
software project managers don’t know how to respect their employees. They just give deadlines and
want that work on the given deadline.
-When you work in a team environment then failure of one person is considered as the failure of
whole team. This is the most ethical behavior but unfortunately most of the software project
managers blame their team members or subordinates without thinking that being a project head it
was also their responsibility to ensure success.

To conclude, the impacts of these dilemmas are not that big if a software manager observes the
code of conducts provided by a country’s law, organization, or IT professional societies.