Questions about a Project

Select one (1) project from your working or educational environment in which you can apply problem solving framework. Next, suggest at least three (3) questions that you would ask yourself in order to identify the root-cause of the problem during the project that you have selected. Justify your response.

Staffing is a problem that occurs on a daily and weekly basis.  When there is a shortage and someone calls out, it can leave the shift in a bad spot.  To relieve some of the pressure off of the others, you will need to call someone else in.  The problem is a lot of people have overtime already, so to keep the overtime at a minimum, we will need to find other areas and alternatives to make sure that no exceeds the overtime limit.  The limit of overtime is 16 hours within a time period, but the only people who are available are the full-time people. The questions that I would ask are:

  1. Where do I start?  You must know who is available and who can work.
  2. What does the overall overtime look like at this moment? Once this has been determined, then we can look at our list of people to call.
  3. Who do I call at short notice?  I usually have a pool of PRN’s and Part-time that I have on standby, so that if we are short or just need extra people, I will have some on hand.