OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Name and describe your organization.

My name is Kevin Miranda and I work as a maintainer for radar, airfield, and weather
systems for the Air Force. The Air Force is a military organization under the Department
of Defense for the United States of America. To be more specific, I work in a section that
is part of a squadron that supports the operations of an airfield located in Dover, DE. Our
main goals are to operate, maintain, and sustain the airfield along with any missions that
require the use of the airfield or air space within 200 nautical miles. Specifically, my
section oversees all navigational aids, weather sensors, and radars that are used in tandem
with communications equipment that air traffic controllers use to navigate the airspace
and airfield.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

I serve as a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force. The rank along with the position I
held was that of a supervisor in a department. I had a small group of people that I was
specifically responsible for, but I also had the power to manage others who worked
alongside me. I worked with other supervisors to manage the whole section that consisted
of a total of 25 individuals including 5 of us supervisors and one person who oversaw all
of us. Typically any of the 5 supervisors can be accountable for people, time and
readiness.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be included).

This situation happened during the pandemic, in the year 2020. The first
lockdown just passed, and we were all trying to navigate how to come back into the

1
 workplace full-time and maintain our mission. Certain measures in place prevented all 25
of us from working in the office at the same time. Our Section Chief helped a virtual
meeting with his 5 supervisors to brainstorm ideas of how to continue working that met
all the restrictions but also didn’t allow us to fall behind on the maintenance of the
equipment we were responsible for. Another restriction we face is that, by regulation of
the Federal Aviation Administration, no navigational aid can be left with any
preventative maintenance procedure that is past due more than the half-life of its
frequency. To further explain this, if a maintenance procedure is done once a year, that
procedure can’t be past its due date by more than 6 months. Another example is that if a
procedure is done once a quarter, it must be completed within 45 days when it is due at
the latest. If this is not done, by regulation, the system that the military uses to navigate
aircraft is decommissioned for safety reasons. One individual suggested we just go in to
work with a small team whenever an outage was reported. This idea was brought forth
with the intention that the restrictions wouldn’t last much longer, and we wouldn’t be in a
situation where we were way past the maintenance deadlines. Since there was no idea
when the COVID restrictions would be lifted we could not move forward with this. I
personally really liked this idea.
Eventually, I suggested that I create small teams of 4 individuals with each
supervisor leading the team with 3 workers under them. This made 5 teams and I did my
best to balance the teams of skill, experience, and dynamic. I created a system in which
each team works 2 days in the office, then the next team goes in and everyone else works
from home. First, there were complaints about the team's choices. I had a supervisor who
was named Bailey complain that I had the best team members, and he felt his team was
lacking in skill. I rebalanced the teams based on input from every other supervisor, we
essentially just held a draft and then discussed the results and voted on trades as a whole.
Things ran smoothly and we had a lot of autonomy amongst ourselves. We quickly
caught up with our maintenance and soon found ourselves in a better position than before
the pandemic. We all realized that when we weren’t forced to be somewhere for x
number of hours and allowed to come in at a time when we felt was logical along with
the idea of being home when we were done, we performed amazingly. That coupled with
the lack of bureaucracy from the Air Force or the need to do other duties outside our
scope, we noticed that we finally had enough time to be on top of our maintenance and
training.
When restrictions were finally lifted a few months later, we slowly fell behind
again like before the pandemic, and I feel a lot of it was the lack of motivation to perform
well along with people having to commit or other responsibilities outside of what we
were trained to do. Like perform drill, write paperwork for awards, reports, surveys, or
attend meetings that could be communicated in an email.