Question

Suppose you are managing 16 employees, and you need to form three teams to work on different projects. Assume that all employees will work on a team, and that each employee has the same qualifications/skills so that everyone has the same probability of getting choosen. In how many different ways can the teams be chosen so taht the number of employees on each project are as follows:

a. 5
b. 1
c. 10

Answer 1

4380 ways

Explanation:

We have to form 3 project of 16 employees, they tell us that the first project must have 5 employees, therefore we must find the number of combinations to choose 5 of 16 (16C5)

We have nCr = n! / (R! * (N-r)!)

replacing we have:

1st project:

16C5 = 16! / (5! * (16-5)!) = 4368 combinations

Now in the second project we must choose 1 employee, but not 16 but 11 available, therefore it would be to find the number of combinations to choose 1 of 11 (11C1)

2nd project:

11C1 = 11! / (1! * (11-1)!) = 11 combinations

For the third project we must choose 10 employees, but since we only have 10 available, we can only do a combination of this, since 10C10 = 1, therefore:

3rd project: 1 combination

The total number of combinations fro selecting 16 employees for each project would be:

4368 + 11 + 1 = 4380 combinations, that is, there are 4380 different ways of forming projects with the given conditions.