Introduction
An in basket exercise is a test used to check if administrators and senior managers have the ability to plan, organize and manage different activities and delegate responsibilities to the most competent assistants. In the test, the candidate is expected to respond to letters, emails, memos, telephone messages, fax and other communiqué at his desk within a stipulated period of time (Stillman 23).
The test is usually administered to managers in the public and private sector (University of British Columbia 1). The candidate is given a limited time to respond to urgent matters and this requires that one develop a plan of action, set priorities on the different tasks, evaluate the task and make tradeoffs and give a rationale for selecting a given task (Public Service Commission of Canada 4).
Description of the case study
In this case study, I.M Trubble is the Assistant Deputy Minister for Immigration in the republic of Canada. After returning from a trip, Trubble finds 16 urgent letters and memos that need to be addressed within a short duration. The letters require her attention on various matters. These matters are classified as:
- Drafting letters and speeches for the minister.
- Departmental roles such as approving travel and leave application.
- Personal matters such as attending the divorce proceedings.
All these matters need her urgent attention but not all these tasks can be performed at the same time. At the moment, she cannot delegate these roles as her two assistant are not within the premises. This means that Mrs.
Trubble has to perform a critical analysis of all the tasks so as to prioritize the main tasks and delegate others at a later date. In the case study, Mrs. Trubble must perform all the activities on Sunday evening. In order to make these decisions and set priorities, an evaluation of the tradeoff between different activities must be done
Determining and Classifying Items
The first step is to determine the nature of all the 16 items in the waiting lists. This was done by listing all the items and classifying these items into three categories. A study of all the 16 items indicate that there are four persistent issues that need to be addressed by the assistant minister, these are
- Refugees operations being handled by the minister.
- Visit by the head of state.
- Other issues such as fraud.
- Personal issues such as the divorce proceedings.
Table 1 below shows the classification of all the items into the different themes.
Priorities list
In order to draw the action plan, it was necessary that a priorities list be created. This list documented the main activities and determined if they were urgent or important. Important activities are those that results to one attaining personal goals and aspirations and must be handled by the senior manager (Henry 10). The important activities in this case were crucial crises meeting and instructions from the minister’s offices.
Under urgent matters were those tasks requiring immediate attention and were considered imperative to the success of the assistant minister. A priority table, classifying items based on their importance and urgency was prepared (Denhardt 54). This table is shown in figure 1 below.
Figure 1.
From the diagram, the activities in the top right Conner are critical and should be performed first. This is because they are both important and urgent. They should be followed by important but less urgent matters; that is, activities in the top left portion of the graph (Watson 143). Duties considered to be urgent but less important should then follow. Lastly, those activities which are less important and urgent should be handled.
From the figure 1, the most urgent and important activities are the president’s visit, preparation of ministers speech notes and to prepare a response to the questions on of stolen items. These items are crucial and should be addressed first. The next activities are those that are important but less urgent. They include: seminar with Latin Americans, leave application, travel reports, refugee issues in Central America and the fraud case.
These issues should be addressed after critical issues. Next are the less important but urgent matters. They include: Trubble divorce proceedings, and the languages bureau meeting. Lastly, there are the less urgent and less important issues such as meeting with Von during lunch time. These activities can be ignored or cancelled Based on the priorities list, the order of attending issues is shown in table 2 attached at the appendix.
Priorities and tradeoff
In terms of priorities, the roles to the minister were given more priority. This is because Mrs. Trubble is the assistant minister and failure to deliver the assigned roles would affect the functionality and integrity of the whole ministry. For example, if Mrs. Trubble did not prepare a report to address the stolen materials required on Monday morning, then the whole ministry would be touted as corrupt by media.
This would affect her career and performance. Also, the ministerial speech to welcome the president was not prepared, then, the president would receive a poor welcome and this would affect the ministry. In this regard, these activities were given the first priority. During the preparation of the priority list, several tradeoffs had to be done. For example, on Monday June 25, Mrs. Trubble had the following meetings:
- Attend a meeting with the minister to answer question about stolen items.
- Attend a language bureau meeting.
- Attend the court as instructed by the royal magistrate.
For this role, tradeoff had to be done. The most important and crucial activity was to attend the meeting with the minister. The consequence was that by doing so, Mrs. Trubble had to ignore the court order summoning her to appear in court. However, the consequences of not attending the court case are not a severe as failing to fulfill her ministerial responsibilities.
Another tradeoff is the fact that Mrs. Trubble had to deal with is the sensitive issue of refugees concerns and other departmental duties. If she addressed refuges matters before the departmental roles, then the departmental activities may delay or are mismanaged. Addressing the refugee’s issues should be a primary concern as opposed to other departmental duties.
Preservation of human life and averting hunger and death are paramount to attending departmental roles. To prevent the department from mismanagement, Mrs. Trubble should delegate non sensitive departmental roles to his administrative and operation assistance.
A cross-examination of the departmental activities also reveals that most roles don’t need immediate attention. Thus, the tradeoff between refugee’s activities and departmental roles is not likely to affect the department.
In terms of the departmental and ministerial duties, the ministerial duties were given priority to departmental issues. This tradeoff required Mrs. Trubble to deal with duties delegated by the minister first and then deal with departmental roles.
Again, the tradeoff did not have a big negative impact as most of the departmental roles could be delegated to the assistant. It was also noted that most departmental issues were not very sensitive as compared to the duties allocated by the minister.
Another tradeoff was made during the assigning of roles to her assistants. It is important that the assistants are given jobs matching their education and skills. Very sensitive and crucial issue should be handled by the assistant minister. The decision to delegate some activities therefore involves a tradeoff between perfect work done by the assistance minister and the work done by her assistants.
Action plan
The action plan will comprise of all the major activities to be undertaken by the assistant minister within the next 24 hours. The action plan has the main activities and the specific time for performing these activities. The action plan also shows the person delegated to perform the given task. Table 3 in the appendix section shows the action plan developed.
Conclusions and recommendations
In this analysis, the main tasks assigned to Mrs. Trubble were prioritized and an action plan drawn. This was based on the evaluation of the different roles and setting the priorities based on the tradeoff between different actions. All activities were grouped into themes and the consequences of each action identified. Based on these consequences, a tradeoff was made.
Activities with the greatest priorities had the largest negative consequences and were addressed first. Activities with the least negative implications were performed last. This prioritization is important in scheduling complex office activities which often overlap.
Works Cited
Denhardt, Robert. Public Administration: An Action Orientation, Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2008. Print.
Henry, Nicholas. Public Administration & Public Affairs, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson publishers, 2012. Print.
Public Service Commission of Canada, 2010, Testing in the Public Service of Canada. Web.
Stillman, Richard. Public Administration: Concepts and Cases, Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.
University of British Columbia, 2010, Testing: In Basket Testing. 2013. Web.
Watson, Robert. Public Administration: Cases in Managerial Role-Playing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson publishers, 2010. Print.
Appendices
Table 2: The major activities classified in terms of priorities.
Table 3: Priorities List.