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Jo Smith
MBA-515 Management
Dr. Little
November 0, 00
Work Teams
In the article, "The Trouble with Teams", Brian Dumaine (14) outlines Boeing Aircraft's use of work teams in manufacturing its Boeing 777 passenger jet. According to Henry Shomber, a chief engineer at the firm, Boeing's organizational structure "encourages teams to work together and seize initiative" (Dumaine, 14, p.5).
The design and manufacture of the Boeing 777 involved approximately 10,000 employees and more than 500 suppliers. Obviously, a team-based structure would be the most efficient way to tackle such a massive project. Thus, Boeing began by creating a hierarchy of teams in order to get all its employees headed in the same direction.
The original hierarchy of teams was comprised of three distinct tiers. The top layer consisted of a management team, made up of five or six top managers from such disciplines as engineering, manufacturing, and finance. This top work team had the primary responsibility of building the plane correctly and on time. The second tier of the hierarchy consisted of 5-0 two-person teams, comprising a group of approximately 50 leaders. These leaders were responsible for over-seeing the third tier of 00 work teams, which were responsible for specific parts of the plane. These 00-plus work teams were cross-functional work-teams of five to 15 workers, and each team was responsible for such items as the airplane's wings, tail, flap, etc…Cross-functional work teams, such as the third tier in Boeing's team structure, are comprised of employees from about the same hierarchical level who are brought together to accomplish a particular task. That is, each work team in the bottom tier was responsible for creating and producing a specific portion of the passenger jet.
Each week, the top management team would meet with the members of the second tier to discuss such items as schedule delays or quality problems. The second tier group would also alert the top management team to any problems they'd noticed while over-seeing the cross-functional teams. Such communication was vital to the success of Boeing's aircraft. Such a team structure worked well to "move information quickly up the organization…[but] that information wasn't moving horizontally as well" (Dumaine, 14, p. 6). In other words, the 00-plus cross-functional teams were not communicating with one another. For instance, the wing team and the cockpit team were not communicating, which inevitably caused serious design glitches. In order to correct the situation, Boeing added yet a fourth tier of work teams, called "airplane integration teams". Boeing added five of these teams, each consisting of 1 to 15 people, in order to properly foster effective communication between the third tier work teams.
The article likened the integration teams to the corpus collosum, the central part of the brain that transmits information between both hemispheres of the brain. This integration team effectively helped to prevent many serious design glitches. For instance, one cross-functional work team designed the passengers' oxygen system in the same place that another team had put the system for different component, a "gasper system". Fortunately, one team noticed the conflicting designs, and contacted an integration team for advice. All three teams worked together, for a mere three hours, before coming up with a clever, inventive solution making a special clamp that could hold both systems. Fortunately for Boeing, the teams were able to spot and correct the glitch before the plane went into production. For instance, according to Dumaine (14), "At the old Boeing, a problem like that probably wouldn't have been caught until the plane was being manufactured, or… would have been pushed up the traditional hierarchy and taken weeks to resolve" (p. 7). Thus, adding airline integration teams was crucial to Boeing's successful teamwork.
Such a team structure has certainly paid off for Boeing the Boeing 777 flew its first test flight with less than half the number of design glitches of earlier programs, and Boeing certainly has its teams to thank for such a success.
References
Dumaine, B. (14, September). The trouble with teams. Fortune, 10(86),86(5pp).
Retrieved November, 1, 00, from Lexus-Nexus database.
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