IEEE 7000 6.2: Role descriptions: the eight roles and their responsibilities

What does 6.2 require?

Eight roles should be filled, combined as workload and competence allow. The Top Management Champion owns strategic policy and makes the work possible (an executive, CTO, CIO, COO or the unit head; the owner in a very small entity), motivating teams to uphold value priorities, resolving conflicts in strategies and priorities, upholding the ethics of decisions through the life cycle, directing communications with customer and acquiring organizations' leaders, receiving and directing responses to concerns from team members or stakeholders, communicating regularly with the team, and explaining how each person's role connects to ethically aligned design. The System Expert (systems, software, hardware or requirements engineer, business analyst, architect) listens to concerns before jumping to a technical solution, develops system requirements that enable ethical value requirements, evaluates alternatives and trade-offs, and optimises technical solutions to support values. The Value Lead organizes, analyses, communicates and records value concepts, concerns, activities and decisions, facilitates value activities and builds compromises through participatory design, without being the person in charge of ethics. The Risk Lead establishes the identification, evaluation, prioritisation and treatment of risks to ethical values, records and communicates risk decisions and reinforces each role's part in them. The User Advocate applies a market or societal perspective, represents stakeholder groups that cannot attend, and advocates reducing social and economic impacts on indirect stakeholders. The Senior Product Manager leads the application of market and context knowledge to value-based ConOps and design decisions and directs their implementation with engineering, marketing and support. The Moderator elicits views, ensures fair consideration without domination and mediates to consensus. The Transparency Manager records decisions and who is accountable in a retrievable form, tracks and reports related decisions, and maintains the Case for Ethics.