Case Study

In December 2016, Arshad Ali joined Imperial Computers Ltd. (ICL) as a Senior Programmer, with a handsome pay. Prior to this job, he worked successfully as an assistant programmer in Gem Computers (Gem). Arshad felt that ICL offered better career prospects, as it was growing much faster than Gem, which was a relatively small company.

Although Arshad had enjoyed working there (at Gem), he realized that to grow further in his field, he would have to join a bigger company, and preferable one that handled international projects. He was sure he would excel in his position at ICL, just as he had done in his old job at Gem.

ICL had international operations and there was more than a slim chance that he would be sent to USA or the UK on a project. Knowing that this would give him a lot of exposure, besides looking good on his resume, Arshad was quite excited about his new job.

Arshad joined Gunjan’s five-member team at ICL. He had met Gunjan during the orientation sessions, and was looking forward to working under her. His team members seemed warm and friendly, and comfortable with their work. He introduced himself to the team members and got to know more about each of them.

Wanting to know more about his boss, he casually asked Rehman, one of the team members, about Gunjan. Rehman said, “Gunjan does not interfere with our work. In fact, you could even say that she tries to ignore us as much as she can.” Arshad was surprised by the comment but decided that Gunjan was probably leaving them alone to do their work without any guidance, in order to allow them to realize their full potential.

At Gem, Arshad had worked under Sultan and had looked up to him as a guide and mentor – always guiding, but never interfering. Sultan had let Arshad make his own mistakes and learn from them. He had always encouraged individual ideas, and let the team discover the flaws, if any, through discussion and experience. He rarely held an individual member of his team responsible if the team as a whole failed to deliver – for him the responsibility for any failure was collective. Arshad remembered telling his colleagues at Gem that the ideal boss would be someone who did not interfere with his/her subordinate’s work. Arshad wanted to believe that Gunjan too was the non-interfering type. If that was the case, surely her non-interference would only help him to grow.

In his first week at work, Arshad found the atmosphere at the office a bit dull. However, he was quite excited. His team had been assigned a new project and was facing a few glitches with the new software. He had thought about the problem till late in the night and had come up with several possible solutions. He could not wait to discuss them with his team and Gunjan. He smiled to himself when he thought of how Gunjan would react when he will tell her that he had come up with several possible solutions to the problem. He was sure she would be happy with his having put in so much effort into the project, right from day one.

He was daydreaming about all the praise that he was going to get when Gunjan walked into the office. Arshad waited for her to go into her cabin, and after five minutes, called her up, asking to see her. She asked him to come in after tem minutes. When he went in, she looked at him blankly and asked, “Yes?” Not sure whether she had recognized him, Arshad introduced himself. She said, “Ok, but why did you want to meet me?” Arshad started to tell her about the problems they were having with the software. But before he could even finish, she told him that she was busy with other things, and that she would send an email with the solution to all the members of the team by the end of the day, and that they could then implement it immediately. Arshad was somewhat taken aback. However, ever the optimist, he thought that she had perhaps already discussed the matter with the team.

Arshad came out of Gunjan’s cabin and went straight to where his team members sat. He thought it would still be nice to bounce ideas off them and also to see what solutions others might come up with. He told them of all the solutions he had in mind. He waited for the others to come up with their suggestions but not one of them spoke up. He was surprised, and asked them point-blank why they were so disinterested.

Aftab, one of the team members, said, “What is the point in our discussing these things? Gunjan is not going to have time to listen to us on discuss anything. She will just give us the solution she thinks is best, and we will just do what she tells us to do; why waste everyone’s time?”

Arshad felt his heart sink. Was this the way things worked over here? However, he refused to lose heart and thought that maybe, he could change things a little. But as the days went by, Arshad realized that Gunjan was the complete opposite of his old boss.

While she was efficient at what she did and extremely intelligent, she had neither the time nor the inclination to groom her subordinates. Her solutions to problem were always correct, but she was not willing to discuss or debate the merits of any other ideas that her team might have. She did not hold the team down to their deadlines not did she ever interfere. In fact, she rarely said anything at all. If work did not get finished on time, she would just blame her team, and totally disassociate herself from them.

Time and again, Arshad found himself thinking of Sultan his old boss, and of how he had been such a positive influence. Gunjan, on the other hand, even without actively doing anything, had managed to significantly lower his motivation levels.

Arshad gradually began to lose interest in his work – it had become too mechanical for his taste. He didn’t really need to think; his boss had all the answers. He was learning nothing new, and he felt his career was going nowhere. As he became more and more discouraged, his performance suffered. From being someone with immense promise and potential Arshad was now in danger of becoming just another mediocre techie.

Questions:

Q1. What, according to you, were the reasons for Arshad’s disillusionment? Answer the question using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Q2. What should Arshad do to resolve his situation?

Q3. What can a team leader do to ensure high levels of motivation among his/her team members?

Please note the dead line in3 hours

In December 2016, Arshad Ali joined Imperial Computers Ltd. (ICL) as a Senior Programmer, with a handsome pay. Prior to this job, he worked successfully as an assistant programmer in Gem Computers (Gem). Arshad felt that ICL offered better career prospects, as it was growing much faster than Gem, which was a relatively small company.

Although Arshad had enjoyed working there (at Gem), he realized that to grow further in his field, he would have to join a bigger company, and preferable one that handled international projects. He was sure he would excel in his position at ICL, just as he had done in his old job at Gem.

ICL had international operations and there was more than a slim chance that he would be sent to USA or the UK on a project. Knowing that this would give him a lot of exposure, besides looking good on his resume, Arshad was quite excited about his new job.

Arshad joined Gunjan’s five-member team at ICL. He had met Gunjan during the orientation sessions, and was looking forward to working under her. His team members seemed warm and friendly, and comfortable with their work. He introduced himself to the team members and got to know more about each of them.

Wanting to know more about his boss, he casually asked Rehman, one of the team members, about Gunjan. Rehman said, “Gunjan does not interfere with our work. In fact, you could even say that she tries to ignore us as much as she can.” Arshad was surprised by the comment but decided that Gunjan was probably leaving them alone to do their work without any guidance, in order to allow them to realize their full potential.

At Gem, Arshad had worked under Sultan and had looked up to him as a guide and mentor – always guiding, but never interfering. Sultan had let Arshad make his own mistakes and learn from them. He had always encouraged individual ideas, and let the team discover the flaws, if any, through discussion and experience. He rarely held an individual member of his team responsible if the team as a whole failed to deliver – for him the responsibility for any failure was collective. Arshad remembered telling his colleagues at Gem that the ideal boss would be someone who did not interfere with his/her subordinate’s work. Arshad wanted to believe that Gunjan too was the non-interfering type. If that was the case, surely her non-interference would only help him to grow.

In his first week at work, Arshad found the atmosphere at the office a bit dull. However, he was quite excited. His team had been assigned a new project and was facing a few glitches with the new software. He had thought about the problem till late in the night and had come up with several possible solutions. He could not wait to discuss them with his team and Gunjan. He smiled to himself when he thought of how Gunjan would react when he will tell her that he had come up with several possible solutions to the problem. He was sure she would be happy with his having put in so much effort into the project, right from day one.

He was daydreaming about all the praise that he was going to get when Gunjan walked into the office. Arshad waited for her to go into her cabin, and after five minutes, called her up, asking to see her. She asked him to come in after tem minutes. When he went in, she looked at him blankly and asked, “Yes?” Not sure whether she had recognized him, Arshad introduced himself. She said, “Ok, but why did you want to meet me?” Arshad started to tell her about the problems they were having with the software. But before he could even finish, she told him that she was busy with other things, and that she would send an email with the solution to all the members of the team by the end of the day, and that they could then implement it immediately. Arshad was somewhat taken aback. However, ever the optimist, he thought that she had perhaps already discussed the matter with the team.

Arshad came out of Gunjan’s cabin and went straight to where his team members sat. He thought it would still be nice to bounce ideas off them and also to see what solutions others might come up with. He told them of all the solutions he had in mind. He waited for the others to come up with their suggestions but not one of them spoke up. He was surprised, and asked them point-blank why they were so disinterested.

Aftab, one of the team members, said, “What is the point in our discussing these things? Gunjan is not going to have time to listen to us on discuss anything. She will just give us the solution she thinks is best, and we will just do what she tells us to do; why waste everyone’s time?”

Arshad felt his heart sink. Was this the way things worked over here? However, he refused to lose heart and thought that maybe, he could change things a little. But as the days went by, Arshad realized that Gunjan was the complete opposite of his old boss.

While she was efficient at what she did and extremely intelligent, she had neither the time nor the inclination to groom her subordinates. Her solutions to problem were always correct, but she was not willing to discuss or debate the merits of any other ideas that her team might have. She did not hold the team down to their deadlines not did she ever interfere. In fact, she rarely said anything at all. If work did not get finished on time, she would just blame her team, and totally disassociate herself from them.

Time and again, Arshad found himself thinking of Sultan his old boss, and of how he had been such a positive influence. Gunjan, on the other hand, even without actively doing anything, had managed to significantly lower his motivation levels.

Arshad gradually began to lose interest in his work – it had become too mechanical for his taste. He didn’t really need to think; his boss had all the answers. He was learning nothing new, and he felt his career was going nowhere. As he became more and more discouraged, his performance suffered. From being someone with immense promise and potential Arshad was now in danger of becoming just another mediocre techie.

Questions:

Q1. What, according to you, were the reasons for Arshad’s disillusionment? Answer the question using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Q2. What should Arshad do to resolve his situation?

Q3. What can a team leader do to ensure high levels of motivation among his/her team members?

A class survey in a large class for first-year college students asked, "About how many minutes do you study on a typical weeknight?" The mean response of the 261 students was x¯¯¯x¯ = 130 minutes. Suppose that we know that the studey time follows a Normal distribution with standard deviation σσ = 65 minutes in the population of all first-year students at this university. Regard these students as an SRS from the population of all first-year students at this university. Does the study give good evidence that students claim to study more than 2 hours per night on the average?

(a) State null and alternative hypotheses in terms of the mean study time in minutes for the population.
(b) What is the value of the test statistic z?
(c) Can you conclude that students do claim to study more than two hours per weeknight on the average?

(a) H0:  Ha:  (Type in "mu" as the substitute for μμ and "!=" for ≠≠.)
(b) z:
(c) Conclusion:  (Answer with "Yes/Y" or "No/N".)

A study is conducted to determine if a newly designed text book is more helpful to learning the material than the old edition. The mean score on the final exam for a course using the old edition is 75. Ten randomly selected people who used the new text take the final exam. Their scores are shown in the table below.

Use a 0.010.01 significance level to test the claim that people do better with the new edition. Assume the standard deviation is 10.3. (Note: You may wish to use statistical software.)

(a) What kind of test should be used?

A. Two-Tailed
B. One-Tailed
C. It does not matter.

(b) The test statistic is  (rounded to 2 decimals).

(c) The P-value is

(d) Is there sufficient evidence to support the claim that people do better than 75 on this exam?

A. Yes
B. No

(e) Construct a 9999% confidence interval for the mean score for students using the new text.
<μ<<μ<

Assume an individual has a utility function of this form U(C, L) = 40 + 5(CxL) This utility function implies that the individual’s marginal utility of leisure is 5C and her marginal utility of consumption is 5L. The individual has an endowment of V=$40 in non-labour income and T = 18 hours to either work (h) or use for leisure (L). Assume that the price of each unit of consumption good p=$2 and the wage rate for each hour of work w=$20.

(a) Calculate the rate at which the individual is willing to sacrifice an additional leisure hour when she is already working 6 hours.

(b) What is this individual’s optimal amount of consumption and leisure?

(c) Suppose that the market wage rate for each hour of work goes up from w=$20 to w=$22. Discuss how you would determine whether the substitution effect or income effect dominates in response to this wage increase. (In answering this part you do not need to do the actual calculations but you need to describe each step you would use)

Tutorial 5

Topic

Qualitative Process Analysis

Questions

Question 1

Consider the following process for the admission of graduate students at a university.

In order to apply for admission, students first fill in an online form. Online applications are recorded in an information system to which all staff members involved in the admissions process have access to. After a student has submitted the online form, a PDF document is generated and the student is requested to download it, sign it, and send it by post together with the required documents, which include:

Certified copies of previous degree and academic transcripts.

Results of English language test.

Curriculum vitae.

When these documents are received by the admissions office, an officer checks the completeness of the documents. If any document is missing, an e-mail is sent to the student. The student has to send the missing documents by post. Assuming the application is complete, the admissions office sends the certified copies of the degrees to an academic recognition agency, which checks the degrees and gives an assessment of their validity and equivalence in terms of local education standards. This agency requires that all documents be sent to it by post, and all documents must be certified copies of the originals. The agency sends back its assessment to the university by post as well. Assuming the degree verification is successful, the English language test results are then checked online by an officer at the admissions office. If the validity of the English language test results cannot be verified, the application is rejected (such notifications of rejection are sent by e-mail). Once all documents of a given student have been validated, the admission office forwards these documents by internal mail to the corresponding academic committee responsible for deciding whether to offer admission or not. The committee makes its decision based on the academic transcripts and the CV. The committee meets once every 2 to 3 weeks and examines all applications that are ready for academic assessment at the time of the meeting. At the end of the committee meeting, the chair of the committee notifies the admissions office of the selection outcomes. This notification includes a list of admitted and rejected candidates. A few days later, the admission office notifies the outcome to each candidate via e-mail. Additionally, successful candidates are sent a confirmation letter by post.

What steps can you extract from this process? Classify these steps into VA, BVA and NVA.

Question 2

Consider the university admission process described in Question 1.

One of the issues faced by the university is that students have to wait too long to know the outcome of the application (especially for successful outcomes). It often happens that by the time a student is admitted, the student has decided to go to another university instead (students send multiple applications in parallel to many universities). Analyse the causes of this issue using a cause–effect diagram.

Question 3

Consider the university admission process described in Question 1.

Analyse the issue described in Question 2 (i.e. is that students have to wait too long to know the outcome of their application, especially for successful outcomes), using a why-why diagram.

Question 4

Write an issue register for the university admission process and the issue described in Question 2 (i.e. is that students have to wait too long to know the outcome of their application, especially for successful outcomes).

Question 5

Consider the university admission process described in Question 1.

Complete Table 1 below using the complaints listed. List the most frequent admission problems first. Prepare a Pareto chart using Chart 1 based on the information in Table 1, alternatively use MS Excel to prepare the Pareto chart.

Online application system is slow – 100 complaints

Confirmation letter not received – 20 complaints

Degree verification takes too long – 120 complaints

Admissions office does not follow through as promised – 40 complaints

Table 1:

Chart 1:

                                                            Admissions complaints

Question 6

Consider the university admission process described in Question 1.

Use the list provided in Question 5. Record each issue in Table 2 and classify each issue using the PICK chart four quadrants, described below.

Possible (low payoff, easy to do): issues that can be addressed if there are sufficient resources for doing so.

Implement (high payoff, easy to do): issues that should definitely be implemented as a matter of priority.

Challenge (high payoff, hard to do): issues that should be addressed but require significant amount of effort. In general one would pick one of these challenges and focus on it rather than addressing all or multiple challenges at once.

Kill (low payoff, hard to do): issues that are probably not worth addressing or at least not to their full extent.

Table 2

Question 7

Consider the university admission process described in Question 1.

Use the admission complaints classified in Table 2, to create a PICK chart using Chart 2, alternatively use MS Excel to prepare the PICK chart.

Chart 2

4 year(s) ago, Carl invested 65,612 dollars. He has earned and will earn 6.94 percent per year in compound interest. If Grace invests 105,332 dollars in 3 year(s) from today and earns simple interest, then how much simple interest per year must Grace earn to have the same amount of money in 9 years from today as Carl will have in 9 years from today? Answer as a rate in decimal format so that 12.34% would be entered as .1234 and 0.98% would be entered as .0098.

4 year(s) ago, Isaac invested 48,596 dollars. He has earned and will earn 9.86 percent per year in compound interest. If Priya invests 93,039 dollars in 2 year(s) from today and earns simple interest, then how much simple interest per year must Priya earn to have the same amount of money in 8 years from today as Isaac will have in 8 years from today? Answer as a rate in decimal format so that 12.34% would be entered as .1234 and 0.98% would be entered as .0098.

1. Which of the following statements is incorrect regarding qualifying criteria for the health insurance premium tax credit?

A) Household income must be below designated levels.

B) The taxpayer cannot have access to affordable essential coverage through an employer.

C) The insurance policy must be purchased directly from an insurance company.

D) The individual may not be eligible as a dependent of another taxpayer.

2. If a taxpayer's AGI is greater than $150,000, no penalty will be imposed if the taxpayer pays estimated tax payments in 2018 equal to what percentage of 2017's income tax liability?

A) 90%                                                       

B)100%

C) 105%

D) 110%

3. Laquan and Sabrina Lewis had alternative minimum taxable income of $1,050,000 in 2018 and file a joint return. For purposes of computing the alternative minimum tax, their exemption is

A) $96,900.

B) $59,400.

C) $0.

D) $109,400.

-Which of the following statements is incorrect regarding qualifying criteria for the health insurance premium tax credit?

A) Household income must be below designated levels.

B) The taxpayer cannot have access to affordable essential coverage through an employer.

C) The insurance policy must be purchased directly from an insurance company.

D) The individual may not be eligible as a dependent of another taxpayer.

-If a taxpayer's AGI is greater than $150,000, no penalty will be imposed if the taxpayer pays estimated tax payments in 2018 equal to what percentage of 2017's income tax liability?

A) 90%                                                       

B)100%

C) 105%

D) 110%

-Reva and Josh Lewis had alternative minimum taxable income of $1,050,000 in 2018 and file a joint return. For purposes of computing the alternative minimum tax, their exemption is

A) $96,900.

B) $59,400.

C) $0.

D) $109,400.