Please provide a detailed description of the key features of the system you would recommend.
Fred’s Airfoil Company is a small manufacturer of private airplanes. The company does all the work involved in designing, testing, and manufacturing the planes as well as selling the planes to individual buyers. Fred Hoffman, the owner of the company, has decided that it is time for a brand new design. He has established a team of engineers and mechanics to work on this project.
SOLUTION
The first step in this process is to determine the goals and mission of the company. For this particular case, a good sample mission statement might be:
“Fred’s Airfoil Company offers uniquely designed personal aircraft for private pilots all over the world by designing innovative airfoils at affordable prices. Airfoils are created, from the original design and engineering, all the way to the sales floor, exclusively by Fred’s Airfoil Company.”
Once the mission is agreed upon, the next step is to decide upon goals. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s focus on the efficient design of new projects. From the information in the case, it appears that different people are creating designs for different components of the aircraft and that they are not communicating very well. This is a problem for teamwork and may be resolved through a team-based performance management system.
With specific goals for performance in mind, a system must be developed for individual performance, which will include the development of specific job requirements. For this task we will use O*NET to find generic job descriptions for each of the members of our team. We will then revise the descriptions to meet our specific goals for this company. Once the performance goals for each employee have been determined, it will be necessary to include information on how each member of the team should be expected to contribute to the team. Given the goal of efficient design and manufacture of the new aircraft, at least part of the performance goals in this case should include the team communicating effectively at each step of the project with the development of each individual aircraft part. Rather than a team that includes engineers only during the initial design and then morphs into manufacturers only, all team members should be included in the project from beginning to end to ensure that each team member “owns” the project and that there is feedback from different aspects of the design and manufacture of the craft.
This team will probably benefit little from peer assessments, as different team members have different skills. Assessment of peer performance should be limited to the types of behaviors that ensure good team performance; for example, communication and task completion. Once the specific behaviors for each team member are agreed upon, they should be added to the performance management program for each employee.
Finally, goals for the entire team must be developed, and specific criteria must be developed. The entire team must be evaluated on these criteria as well.
Performance evaluations should be completed somewhat frequently, perhaps once a month or so, because this project is not likely to take more than about a year, and problems can quickly take the project off track.