Discussion questions

Annie is considering amending her current organizational structure.  Using your reading  to support the reasoning, advise Annie on the organizational structure that might work well to help solve her project problem:

Project:  Annie Oakley wishes to develop the business to incorporate a new style of rifle that is computer generated, plastic, and collapsible.  The rifle also takes plastic bullets. This process must cost less than 1 million dollars and take less than 2 months to produce.  Annie has one large client who will pay 3 times her investment and is anxious to accept the project.  However, it will be a one of a kind project and Annie is not sure others will have a use for the gun in the future.  

Annie currently has four leadership team members that each head up a division: rifle design, rifle manufacture, customer service, and sales. They each have final decision making authority within their departments.  Annie says that she is thinking of creating an additional link in the decision train for the new project with one department head that like the other division heads, reports to the leadership team.  Annie feel the need to disband the project after the client sale is complete.  Annie would like to know what would happen if the fifth link were self-contained.  Explain how you would allocate the resources of the company to make the new link in the decision train work on a daily basis?  Be creative yet practical thinking of the types of people you would need to accomplish the goal, financial resources, human capital, etc.  Be sure to consider the various other departments and how they would interface with the project team.  Alternatively, how would the link work if it were self- contained?

Learning Activity 2 - Theme 2

Choose one of the two questions below and answer it using the weekly readings and two external sources to support your reasoning.  

1)    How has technology changed the way manager define how tasks are performed within an organizational structure?

2)    One of the manager’s job is to keep stability within an organization. What happens to structure when the walls are missing? How do tasks get complete and by whom?

Don’t forget to include your in-text citations and references in your responses.  Also, please make sure that you post your learning activities (LAs) separately.