Three Urgent Issues in a Six-Person Unit
You are the coordinator of a six-person unit in an EU agency. Two colleagues are absent: one on certified sick leave, one on pre-approved annual leave. At 09:10 the director's office asks for a two-page briefing on a draft implementing act by 17:00 today; the text must be checked against the unit's file. At 10:00 a statutory report, due at 09:00 tomorrow, is found to contain a figure that may be wrong; the author is on leave and the source spreadsheet is locked. At 11:00 a trainee tells you she accidentally sent an internal draft to a stakeholder list; the draft contains no personal data but does contain a preliminary position. Your remaining staff are one policy officer (working on the statutory report), one assistant (handling the director's request), and one new colleague who is still learning procedures. You have no overtime budget. The director's office says the 17:00 briefing cannot slip; the statutory report has a legal deadline.
1. At 11:05, what should you do first, and how do you sequence the three issues? Justify the order using urgency, impact and reversibility.
Read the worked answer
First action: contain the misdirected email. Ask the trainee to identify the recipient list and the exact draft, then send a short recall or correction asking recipients to delete the draft and confirm deletion. Preserve a record of what was sent and to whom. Notify your line manager and the appropriate internal contact for data protection, confidentiality or communications, depending on the agency's procedure. This comes first because it is the most time-sensitive and the least reversible: the longer the draft sits in external inboxes, the more likely it is to be circulated or quoted. It also takes minutes rather than hours.
Second: protect the statutory report. It has a legal deadline tomorrow morning, and a wrong figure could require correction or escalation. Allocate the policy officer to verify the figure against the source spreadsheet, audit trail and any published equivalents. Check whether the locked spreadsheet can be opened through a delegated access route.
Third: deliver the director's briefing. Its 17:00 deadline is fixed but it has several hours of buffer. The assistant can start a structured draft immediately, with you reviewing it.
The sequencing is not purely serial. The email containment is a short burst; the report verification and briefing drafting should run in parallel under clear ownership. The ranking reflects impact and reversibility first, legal deadline second, and a fixed but later deadline third.
2. The policy officer says she cannot both verify the report and help with the briefing. How do you allocate the three remaining staff, and what do you tell the director's office?
Read the worked answer
Allocate by skill and accountability, not by whoever is nearest:
- Policy officer: statutory report only. She has the substantive knowledge to test the suspect figure and to document the verification. Splitting her across both tasks would risk two half-finished products.
- Assistant: director's briefing. Give a clear template: issue, legal basis, state of play, three options, one recommendation, and a source line for each factual claim. The assistant drafts; you review.
- New colleague: gather the unit's file references and check that the briefing cites the correct document versions. This is useful supervised work and does not require independent judgement.
- You: handle the email containment, take the escalation calls, and quality-check both outputs.
Tell the director's office: the briefing will be delivered by 15:30, not at the last minute, and one figure is still being verified. State that if a factual summary is needed earlier, you can provide a one-page summary by 13:00. Do not promise overtime or a guarantee that the report figure is correct before verification. The message should be specific about time, product and caveat.
3. At 15:00 the assistant says the briefing needs a figure that only the absent report author can confirm. What do you do?
Read the worked answer
Do not guess and do not automatically contact the author on leave. First check whether the figure can be confirmed from an authoritative source: the locked spreadsheet's audit trail, the underlying data extract, a previously published version, or the file held by the responsible policy officer. If the source is accessible through a delegated route, use it and record the check.
If the figure remains unconfirmed, decide what the briefing can honestly say. Options include:
- present the figure as provisional and label it clearly;
- give a verified range instead of a false point estimate;
- omit the figure and state that verification is under way.
Then tell the director's office before 15:30, not after: 'The briefing is ready except for one figure. We can either issue it with a provisional marker or delay that section until 16:30.' That gives the decision-maker a real choice.
Contact the absent author only if the figure is essential and no other authoritative source exists, and then keep the contact minimal and documented. The judgement is to protect accuracy without turning a recoverable gap into a missed deadline or an unjustified intrusion into a colleague's leave.