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The Manhattan Project

This paper is an in depth analysis of the movie Fat Man & Little Boy. It focuses on the structure and business processes used in manufacturing the atomic bomb.

Team 8 – Team Exam

1. Draw the organizational design for how Groves and Oppenheimer set up the project. Include description of their basic business processes. Describe how you would modify their organization to be more effective. Show this in a drawing. Be sure to tell how your modification is really different from the original organization.
Original Organization

General Groves is in charge of the entire project, so it can be said that he acts in the role of CEO. Robert Oppenheimer leads the design and testing of the bomb. Groves sets up the project with three main departments - the Operations group, which includes material management and research site maintenance, the Manufacturing group located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the plutonium is developed, and the R&D group, made up of prominent scientists from around the country tasked with designing and testing the bomb. A site is set up in Los Alamos, New Mexico for the R&D and testing efforts. Rules are established in order to keep the project top secret and the individuals involved are all held to the location for the duration of the assignment. General Groves begins by setting up the organization using a centralized, mechanistic structure. He establishes a formal chain of command and a functional group hierarchy, controlling all communication, procedures, and correspondence. Groves also limited the amount of interaction between each of the functional groups, resulting in each group working in some degree of isolation. He even stated this intention at one point, stating that he didn’t want the engineer talking to the theorists, and didn’t want the theorists talking to the manufacturing team. This bureaucratic structure allows for vertical communication flow, which Groves believes will keep the project under control and is also...