Question

Seo Yeon is a paid intern working for a small team of four software developers. Each member of the team is facing different deadlines and requires her support at different times—and all of them want to pawn their least enjoyable tasks off on her. Seo Yeon is there to learn and is happy to help out on any tasks they can give her, but she only has 40 hours per work week to offer.

Identify the solution that is likely to best allocate her time between the four team members.

Seo Yeon should only work on tasks that provide her with the opportunity to further her personal knowledge.

Seo Yeon should set up an internal market, allocating 10 hours per week to each team member and allowing them to trade hours among themselves over the course of a month.

Seo Yeon should determine which team member is most valuable to the company and allocate all 40 hours to that team member.

Seo Yeon should allocate 10 hours per week to each team member and ensure that her time is distributed fairly between the team members each week.

Answer 1

Seo Yeon being a paid intern that too at a small firm should go for the opportunity that maximises her learning and skills needed to work in an office atmosphere be it a small or big firm. She has 40 hours per work week which should be used judiciously to maximize her gain which though not so much in monetary aspects but definitely high in skillset acquisition will help her when she goes to a bigger company or leads one herself.

Therefore as it is a question of choosing among the four the best option b) she should allocate 10 hrs per week to each member and allow them to trade hours among themselves in the course of the month.

The reason for choosing so is as there are different deadlines for different team members, it is quite likely that the probability that Seo gets to work for one week to a particular member when he or she is need of her to pawn off their difficult tasks is less.

For ex the one team is in requirement of assistance from Seo but she is with some other team as that week was devoted to some other team won't make her learn the difficult tasks that the others are willing to pawn off on her.

Therefore this trading of hours will make it possible for the team as well as Seo to assist the one who is need immediately instead of helping the one who is routinely doing his work.

As for the other options it will not be nice for if she does only those jobs she doesn't know about.Doing both what we know and what we don't know makes us a better package.

As far as doing only what the most valued team is doing won't be helpful as it will limit her skillset suited only to that task instead of knowing about all the other tasks.

Devoting 10 hours per week to each member and ensuring fairness would lead to situations when she is in need by the other team members but she will have to do what the one she is helping in that week is telling her to do.

Hence the best option to maximize her gain would be the second option