Value maximization – grabbing high-value work

The systemic underdelegation concept

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. Senior would include anyone higher up in the organizational structure. A client should be treated as a senior too. Moreover is junior a relative term and it refers to anyone who is junior to you in the organizational structure. So an APL would be the junior of a PL for example.

This 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.

Introduction and importance

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 valuable deliverables the more clients are willing to pay. Similarly, administrators and recruiters create value in their daily work. You can also help LiteBreeze create even more value as an organization by avoiding systemic underdelegation and by grabbing as high-value tasks as you can possibly handle with quality.

This concept is not only important for LiteBreeze but also for yourself. The more high-value work that you can grab and perform successfully, the more valuable you will be to the organization which is one of the single most important factors when appraising your salary.

Grab high-value tasks – the essentials

Eliminate all kinds of upward delegation

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 about if there is something more you can do before reporting to a senior. Or you may feel that only your senior can handle, or is allowed handle, certain work.

Don’t be afraid to take initiative, even if this means making some mistakes in the beginning. It’s usually more valuable to take action than being overly careful and constantly asking seniors for advice. Try to “push things forward” as independently as you can, while still keeping stakeholders in the loop. Most of the specific examples below are actually variations of preventing upward delegation.

Ensure LiteBreeze Principles perfection

…in your own work by continuously referring to the LiteBreeze Principles (LPs) in your daily work. The LPs are instructions, and if you don’t follow them then high-value senior resources need to be wasted to make sure that you do.

Follow instructions and minimize mistakes

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 if: a) a large percentage of instructions are missed b) important instructions are missed c) you repetitively fail to follow instructions –  then this is a serious warning sign, and it means that expensive senior time is being wasted.
By following instructions to the point and double-checking your deliverables carefully, you add value and build rapport:

1. You save valuable time from the other party.
2. The other party will trust you and your work, and not feel the need to double-check your work in the future.
3. The other party will feel that you respect his/her time and instructions, resulting in satisfaction and rapport.
4. The other party will give you more complex work in the future, giving you a chance to fastrack your career.

So before you deliver something, carefully double-check that you haven’t made any mistakes or missed any instruction. There are often instructions given in previous communications, documents or guidelines too.

Think twice before asking seniors

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. 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.

Coordinate and seek help from the least senior first

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.

Clear information to form the basis for decisions

If you need to delegate decision-making upward then provide detailed information to serve as the basis for the decision. The senior should be able to take 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. 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!

Work full-time

Work full-time and become more valuable:

1. As fixed costs are high, the marginal value of each extra hour is high. So consistently putting in a full 8 hours instead of 6.5 hours will have a big impact on the value you add. If you work for a paying client, you would probably help generate 4 times higher surplus by working 100% instead of 80%. The same principle applies for non-billed staff: the marginal value of Project Director, recruiters and admins can be very high as well.
2. Seniors often expect you to be available the whole working day. Service quality might be negatively affected if you’re not there when the client/senior needs you.
3. If you want to be in a leading position you need to be a role model to new recruits and juniors.
4. Once a client has approved a project they need fast progress and our work plans usually assume that you put in 8 hours daily.

Take initiative

Take initiative to do things that you know needs to be done. A small and 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 from your senior.

Help recruit great talent

We’re always looking for great talent. Please help us grow:

1. Refer friends and ex-colleagues.
2. Share and like our social media posts.
3. Give us a positive rating on social media including Google, Glassdoor, Facebook.
4. Suggest how to improve LiteBreeze in general to the recruitment and admin team as well as management.

Grab high-value tasks – higher-value examples

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. You can read more detailed examples in the Senior guidelines.

Grab work from seniors

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? Help us avoid systemic underdelegation.

Delegate

Delegate tasks to colleagues who are out of client work. If your senior is out of work, delegate the most complex task in your todo list/work-plan.

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). Don’t just delegate though, also verify quality and coach.

Coaching

Help juniors attain LiteBreeze Principles (LPs) perfection by coaching. It would be an organizational waste if your senior needs to coach your juniors when it comes to LPs that you yourself are well aware of (but that your juniors might not be). Ensuring your juniors LP perfection, and doing that for an increasing number of total project hours, is a sure way of being promoted to higher leadership.

Promote LiteBreeze

Help with branding and marketing by contributing content to our blog and social media pages. Read more in the blog guidelines.

Tasks that technical staff should grab

If you are a developer, designer or QA you can grab the following tasks:

Prepare case studies

Prepare case studies of your projects for our portfolio. 

Prepare smart feature suggestions

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.

Handle prospective clients

including estimation, webcam meetings, smart feature suggestions, identification of relevant case studies, developer profiles, etc. Read more in the Leads Guidelines.

Valuable backup tasks

If you ever run out of client work please email relevant seniors, preferably in advance so that seniors have time to assign relevant work without causing you to sit idle. Include your own assumptions about backup tasks. Client work generally has the highest priority but there are other very valuable tasks.

Try to switch priorities to getting new client work approved. Here are some examples, ordered by highest impact and lowest effort:

1. What might your existing clients need done? Can you start on features that the client was interested in earlier?
2. Grab tasks from those who have more work than what they can handle.
3. Assist with new leads: prepare estimates, work plans, wireframes. Read leads guidelines for more information.
4. Smart feature suggestions for your existing clients.
5. Prepare case studies.
6. Coach your juniors. Read coaching guidelines for more information.
7. Prepare for your next appraisal.
8. Training.

Tremendous cumulative effects

I encourage you to grab as high-value tasks as you feel that you can handle with quality. If you have no previous experience of say preparing a case study I understand that you may be worried about taking it on, however, it’s always better that you take initiative than do nothing; mistakes can be learned from and passiveness will take us nowhere.

Even smaller tasks can have tremendous cumulative effects: a junior developer who can draft a perfect work plan and case study on their own would free up a senior who instead can present a great proposal to a prospective client.

The time eventually saved from me can be put into very high-value tasks that I cannot easily delegate such as:

1. working on marketing efforts that allow us to find better clients and talented new recruits
2. having meetings with potential but reluctant high-value clients and great talent
3. negotiating higher rates and with major clients who have requested discounts
4. designing better systems and processes

So when everyone focuses on value maximization the company is allowed to grow in a way that would otherwise not be possible.

Prioritize High-Impact Low-Effort tasks

Focus on tasks that have the Highest Impact but require the Lowest Effort (HILE). A HILE task is “low-hanging fruit”. A task that adds much value may not always be the right task to do next if it is very time-consuming. Reprioritizing your todo list is not always easy as you need to roughly assess how valuable a task is and how much time it would take. But by thinking hard about how to prioritize our work we can become a lot more productive.

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 your less occupied juniors at some point of time. Just because a senior emails you a task, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to get it immediately; if it’s a low prio task it’s enough to acknowledge it and adding it to your todo list. I personally try to mention if something is low prio, but ideally assess priority level yourself based on the value it would add.

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 sign-up 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 for launching.