Question

passage require analysis and breakdown

In my current role COVID-19 preparations have taken up a lot of our time and resources in the past 2 months. We have discussed not only logistics problems as a leadership to determine which departments and which representatives are the highest priority to receive devices that allow them to work from home. We could only receive a set amount of these devices in waves and we determined that front line employees that are client facing must have these devices first, followed by employees whose primary function is operational and process paperwork and documents for clients, followed by exempt employees that are also client facing but have more flexibility to use work cell phones to interact with clients, followed by other employees that are not client facing. In this example we are optimizing the ability to keep our employees safe by allowing them to work from home instead of having to come into the office. We also had to determine scheduling issues such as having representatives take multiple types of telephone calls from investors. As our telephone lines became busier, we had to ask our representatives (who work in the fixed income department) to please take calls from the main service line which include equity, derivatives, and account maintenance calls. This is optimizing the client experience and service levels. The best example for blending is that we have representatives work on projects outside of their current role of taking incoming calls. It helps keep engagement high and allows them some time away from their day to day role to expand their capabilities and experiences. This is optimizing employee engagement in a time when things are uncertain, and news is changing on a constant basis as the social distancing rules are likely to be in effect for a while.

I believe that sensitivity analysis is the most realistic linear programming approach that would have been most useful to use as we were thinking through these situations and searching for efficiencies on resources and time. “Sensitivity analysis is important to decision makers because real-world problems exist in a changing environment. Prices of raw materials change, product demands change, production capacities change, stock prices change, and so on” (Anderson et al., 2016, p. 310). Employee numbers change as we’ve had to hire seven new representatives into our department during a time when resources are slim, everyone is working virtually, and time is a finite resource so we are not able to dedicate 100% of the day to training these new representatives or find them the right resources to work from home like everyone else because they weren’t included in the initial figures. However as stated by Anderson et al., “Classical sensitivity analysis is based on the assumption that only one coefficient changes; it is assumed that all other coefficients will remain as stated in the original problem… In many cases, however, we are interested in what would happen if two or more coefficients are changed simultaneously. The easiest way to examine the effect of simultaneous changes is to rerun the model” (2016, p. 319). Therefore in using sensitivity analysis to assist us with this ever changing environment we would likely need to run multiple analyses to determine the best case or optimal scenarios.

Answer 1

The passage talks about the discussion around work from home (WFH) pertaining to current situation of Covid-19.

Various topics discussed are Logistic problems and Leadership problems combined. It talks about prioriting which department and employee be given resources (in be in terms of computers and IT related, or furniture, or else).

The decision to give out the devices followed the following list in the given order only:

1. Front line employees (who face the clients directly)

2. Operational employees (who process paper work and documents for clients)

3. Exempt employees (who can interact with clients over phone as well)

4. Client non-facing employees

This was done to reduce the risk of employee while travelling to job.

To optimize the client service, representatives are asked to tap lines from main server line, since now, department's own lines are prone to get busier. This is made smoother by asking representatives from different departments to take to calling, since the work is low for their departments currently. This keeps them engaged and let them expand their skill set.

To analyse such a decision, senstivity analysis is found to be suitable, since it deals real-life experiences with changing environment. Theoritically, the analysis runs on various assumptions, and thus, to keep it authentic, the department is looking for multiple analysis, keeping each variable constant one by one.

The given passage tries to analyse the changing environment, demand and supply factors with the changing firm's structures to adapt to the environment. It starts with the internal changes decided in the structure, followed by the analysis the leadership is looking at.