You have one quarter and a team of six engineers. The stated goal is to reduce cost per shipment by 8%. The options are: (A) route optimisation, estimated 5% cost reduction, 10 engineer-weeks, dependent on a mapping vendor with a 6-week contract lead time. (B) automated proof-of-delivery capture, removes 1.5 minutes per drop across 40,000 drops a month, 6 engineer-weeks. (C) a warehouse slotting rework, 3% cost reduction, 14 engineer-weeks, requires two weeks of warehouse downtime. (D) a customer tracking page, no direct cost impact, 4 engineer-weeks, requested by the three largest customers who are up for renewal.
Set your criteria, evaluate the options against them, commit to an order, and say what you are not doing and why. Explain how you would defend it to the customers who lose out.
100 points, 60% to pass.
A quarter with six engineers is roughly 72 engineer-weeks, so this is not a capacity puzzle — everything nominally fits, which means the real constraints are the dependencies and the downtime. A is the largest cost lever but has a six-week vendor lead time that must start immediately or it cannot land in the quarter. C's two weeks of warehouse downtime is a business cost the engineering estimate hides. D has no cost impact at all and so fails the stated goal, but three renewals is a real risk the goal does not capture — strong answers say so explicitly rather than either ignoring D or quietly abandoning the stated objective for it.