Creating as much value as possible is one of the core principles here at LiteBreeze.
The excerpt below is from a book written by Harvard professor David Maister, who has spent decades advising professional services firms on how to become better.
The term “senior” includes anyone higher up in the organizational structure as well as clients. “Juniors” is a relative term; an APL is junior to a PL.
System underdelegation focuses on a single bad habit that reduces profitability, adversely affects motivation and morale, reduces a firm’s competitive capabilities, and in addition prevents senior professionals from spending more time with complex challenges, clients and investing in the future of the firm. This bad habit is called systemic underdelegation.
Imagine that a questionnaire was sent to each and every professional in your firm, top-to-bottom, asking the following single question: What percentage of your professional work time is spent doing things that a more junior person could do, if we got organized and trained the junior to handle it with quality?
My research shows that, for the typical professional service firm, the firmwide average is frequently as high as 40 or 50 percent, and sometimes more. This is equivalent to saying that, of the firm’s entire productive capacity, 40 or 50 percent is consumed with a higher-priced person performing a lower-value task.
Obviously, this is not a wonderful situation. If one examined a manufacturing company and discovered that, of all the resources used to produce the company’s output, some 40 or 50 percent were more expensive than necessary to achieve the same level of quality, one would be tempted to use words like “inefficient,” “unproductive,” “wasteful.” The same words, I believe, can be applied to most firms’ methods of operation. Internal excerpt.
As a developer, designer or QA you create value through the applications that you develop every day, and the service quality that you provide.
The more value that you provide, the more clients are willing to pay. Similarly, administrators and recruiters create value in their daily work.
You can boost your value-creation further by avoiding systemic under delegation and by grabbing as high-value tasks as you can possibly handle with quality.
Avoiding under delegation is not only important for LiteBreeze. The value that you add is the single most important factor in your appraisal.
Upward delegation is when you delegate a task that you actually can handle yourself to a more senior person. This is often unintentional. You may not have thought hard enough if there is something more you can do before reporting it to a senior. Or you may feel that only your senior can handle, or is allowed to handle, certain work.
Most of the specific examples below are actually variations of preventing upward delegation. Avoiding upward delegation is how you can combat systemic under delegation and boost the value that you add to the organization.
Contemplate our principles as often as you can: how can you better apply the core concepts? Do you follow all practical examples given in the principles? What feedback do your colleagues receive and can you improve in similar situations?
The principles are instructions, and if you don’t follow them then high-value senior resources need to be wasted to make sure that you do. Work actively on your appraisal document in between appraisal meetings to minimize nonconformity with principles.
Push things forward as independently as you can, and as far as you can. Present solutions using clear communication and with as few communication exchanges as possible.
Take it upon yourself to handle tasks on your own accord. Don’t state problems without also suggesting solutions. Take control of your tasks and the way you communicate to seniors.
You may feel that only your senior can handle, or is allowed to handle, certain work. Don’t be afraid to take initiative, even if this means making some mistakes in the beginning.
It’s often more valuable to take action than being overly careful and constantly asking seniors for advice.
Before you deliver something, carefully double-check that you haven’t made any mistakes or missed any instruction. Follow instructions to the point to avoid that the other party has to report an issue twice and follow up.
This may seem obvious, but many times you may just want to deliver fast which may cause you to inadvertently overlook issues.
Of course, all of us sometimes forget an instruction, but aiming for perfection when it comes to instructions is one of the easiest ways to gain seniors’ trust.
By following instructions to the point and double-checking your deliverables carefully, you add value and build rapport:
Instructions are not only given in direct emails but also indirectly through feedback documents (yours and others), guidelines and routines.
It’s natural that a few mistakes will slip through here and there, but it’s a serious matter if:
Perhaps you sometimes ask a senior how to solve a problem too soon, instead of doing a more thorough analysis of your own? If you do ask a senior, suggest a solution at the same time.
Put forward the best solution to the problem that you can come to think of. It’s a good learning exercise and allows your senior to coach you.
If you feel the need to discuss with a senior and your questions are not urgent: wait till you have a list of several points to discuss, then email a request for a meeting so that the senior’s time can be efficiently used and to reduce the interruption factor.
If you need to gather information, coordinate or need help it’s often better that you ask a colleague with lower or the same seniority as you to start with, and thereafter ask a senior if you couldn’t get a satisfactory result.
If you need to delegate decision-making upward then provide detailed yet concise information to serve as a basis for the decision (beslutsunderlag). The senior should be able to make a well-informed decision quickly.
The senior shouldn’t need to look up old emails, articles, links, transcripts, charts, PDFs – whatever it may be – before taking the decision. Beslutsunderlag is an appropriate Swedish word in this case, that I yet haven’t found a good translation of.
Consolidate everything in one simple report, include your suggestions and try to make it as easy as possible for seniors to take a good decision.
The goal should be that the senior just needs to reply “Proceed!”. You are now saving much valuable time!
Ensure value-added by working full-time:
Take the initiative to do things that you know needs to be done. Avoid seniors having to remind you about tasks, especially recurring tasks and routines.
A simple example would be to prepare for your appraisal around the time that your next hike should take effect. Then inform the relevant senior when you are ready, instead of waiting for a reminder.
We’re always looking for great talent and great new clients. Please help us grow:
Around 1000 people see our 5 star Google rating every month. Several acquaintances, candidates and even clients have mentioned that they saw our online ratings. These ratings win us clients and talent.
If seniors have entrusted you with senior responsibilities, or you feel that you can take on more senior responsibilities, then please grab the following kind of tasks.
What are your immediate seniors spending time on and can you help them by taking over some of that work while ensuring a similar level of quality? Scrutinize their PTOs (staff panel) and todo lists.
The more senior you are, or strive to be, the more aggressively you should delegate. Don’t just delegate; verify quality and coach.
Delegation is how the company grows, and it is crucial if you strive to add value by growing your own team.
Delegate tasks to colleagues who are out of client work. Delegate the simplest tasks in your to do list to your juniors, as long as that junior can perform the task with quality (with a bit of help of course).
Help your colleagues to grow through coaching. Ensuring your juniors’ performance, and doing so for an increasing number of colleagues, is a sure way of getting promoted.
Build yourself and LiteBreeze authority within your field through content marketing.
Grow your team. Can you retain your client long-term, make the client more profitable, coach your existing team – then ask the PD for more permanent resources.
If you are a developer, designer or QA you can grab the following tasks:
Keep billed hours high. As a developer, you can’t entirely control your clients’ demand, especially if you’re not very senior, but there is always action you can take:
If you’re about to become idle, proactively switch priorities to getting new client work approved, both for the short and long term. Here are some examples, ordered by highest impact and lowest effort:
If you’ve done all the above and you still seem to run out of client work, then email relevant seniors with as great advance as possible. Include your own assumptions about backup tasks.
Client work has the highest priority but there are other valuable tasks:
BOFT of top seniors might be lower due to the time they spend on unbilled tasks like leads, content marketing and certain coaching tasks.
Prepare case studies of your projects for our portfolio.
Prepare smart feature suggestions so that we can generate value for clients with minimal involvement from their side. It’s a good sign if a client continuously gives you more work and it’s an even greater sign if you are able to generate so much business from a client that it allows you to grow your project team by adding additional developers.
Project estimation, webcam meetings, smart feature suggestions, identification and improvement of relevant case studies and developer profiles etc.
Even if you can grab just a smaller task, that can have tremendous cumulative effects: a junior developer who can maintain a work plan and case study on their own would free up a senior who instead can present a great proposal to a prospective high-value client.
The time eventually saved from me can be put into very high-value tasks that I cannot easily delegate such as:
So when everyone focuses on value maximization the company is allowed to grow in a way that would otherwise not be possible.
Prioritize tasks that have the Highest Impact but require the Lowest Effort (HILE). A HILE task is “low-hanging fruit”.
Evaluate what is most valuable and how long you will need to complete it when you move over to your next task. Prioritize your work accordingly, and you will be a lot more productive over time. Make time for work that matters.
Once you are done with your top HILE tasks, a new HILE task might have come up, resulting in that low-prio tasks may stay unfinished in your todo list for months.
This is totally fine, and often such low-prio tasks can be delegated to juniors at some point of time. Don’t “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel”.
Just because a senior emails you a task it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do it immediately; if it’s a low-prio task it’s enough to acknowledge it and adding it to your todo list.
An administrative HILE task could be spending five minutes on phoning a client about a large unpaid invoice instead of bookkeeping. For recruiters, it could be convincing a reluctant but high-potential hire or encouraging positive social media reviews before calling low-potential candidates.
The examples below are applicable for technical staff.
Focus on the core process where end-users will spend most of their time. Before developing time-consuming, complex and non-urgent features the core process must be user-friendly and neatly designed.
An example would be fixing a signup process before moving on to say developing an admin report. A bug in the core process is obviously more HILE than a rarely used report that very few end users have access to.
Deliver incrementally instead of keeping a bunch of features on your local machine that each is 90% complete. Finish one feature 100% and upload it so the client can reap the benefits early.
Even if it doesn’t allow end-users to start using the application, at least QA and seniors can start the QA process and thus reduce the timeframe needed to launch.
2004 - 2024 © LiteBreeze AB
