Virtual Teams in Action: Building the F-35 Fighter
Chapter 4: Job Analysis & Job Design

Kiley Burns
MNA 2300-01Z
Case Study One: pg.174

Sept. 6 2014

Building the F-35 aircraft takes a lot of manpower... planning, designing, engineering, teamwork, time, communication, telecommunications and overall motivation. Before you can even start a project such as this, you need people with the skills, physical ability, experience, training, and overall manual dexterities. The success of this project is not the result from just one person; the result was from a team. You can always accomplish more together than you can alone. An organization is a body of people with a particular purpose, for example, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics paired up with a few other partners to make this project a success. This paper will continue with a summary of how this project relates to job analysis and design. First comes first, we use strategic planning to organize structure and a strategy to keep a steady workflow and a good position for the future. Keeping accurate inputs throughout the workflow can result in good outputs and prevent from a large amount of holdups. These holdups can consist of things like redesigning; redesigning comes with more money and time. However, when building an aircraft or anything, quality is key. Those redesigns, if necessary, are essential because they can save lives or prevent people from getting hurt. Following planning and workflow, now we need the people who can do the job. Recruitment and selection entails advertising for the jobs with the job descriptions, qualifications, required experience (if needed), and availability. This is a great way to learn about the candidates and weeding out the bad ones. Once the employees are selected, there always need to be training. In training, the employees learn exactly what is expected of them and what it will take to advance to different jobs in the organization. The training gives the employees a chance to prove themselves and develop upon their skills. Note: this is also another way to weed out the people who are not as qualified as they proposed. Training is like practice and practicing before working on an aircraft will be handy because it will make the workflow a bit faster. Page 1
Hence, Lockheed and their partners had to take all of this into consideration with this project and more. Working on such a huge project can get tiring and employees can start getting less motivated. In order to keep your employees motivated, they need to be taken care of, but within the company’s means of budget. Things like compensation, time off and reasonable benefits can go along way with keeping happy and hard working employees. Tying all these concepts together is what brings together an effective project such as the F-35 aircraft. On another note, one thing that helped the teams work internationally was telecommunications. They communicated via computers, emails, shared documents, etc. Using all of their resources possible, they got the job done. Telecommunication was a big advantage in this project. Considering Lockheed Martin worked