Founder in Eleven

In aligning outstanding client service, fulfilling careers and professional satisfaction for our employees along with financial success for the firm, one of the most difficult issues to address is an under-delegation problem.  Quotes that are often bellringers for under-delegation include:

• “I know we are behind and I don’t have time to add additional people to the project”
• “The client only wants our most experienced people staffed on the project”
• “I could get this done quicker myself”
• “I prefer to do this myself”
• “I have more confidence in this getting done if I do it myself”
• “I didn’t include junior people in my estimate”

IT Services are even more difficult in that often times the solo “wizard” programmer is glorified as the miracle worker with incentives and praise heaped on the individual for the martyrdom of working long hours by themselves.

Under-delegation – Why Is It a Problem?

Too often, IT service firms can make decisions in a “sprint” mentality rather than the “marathon” for long-term success.  With the pressure of a client’s push on budget and timeline, as well as an “I would rather do it myself” internal motivation, short-term decisions focus on getting the current project complete without adding staff. This mindset misplaces what drives long-term success over the marathon of a career, client relationship and profitable firm.  Under-delegation in the short-term has the following long-term consequences:

• Our People – Under-delegation results in junior people not getting the training, supervision and responsibility to improve themselves.  Senior resources will not get the supervision experience and leverage to add more value to the firm and justify higher responsibility and compensation.  Senior resources will also do the same tasks for the same clients over and over again which can get redundant compared to new projects and challenges that are more interesting and career developing.  In a highly competitive IT job market, either condition can result in increased turnover as both senior and junior resources can easily look for other opportunities outside of the firm to get the job experience, compensation and responsibility they desire.
• Our Clients – Once conditioned that only senior people can deliver a project, how can a client relationship evolve to allow the client to be comfortable with junior people cost-effectively handling routine tasks?  After the bulk of the hard initial work is complete, many times experienced resources want to move on to more challenges and allow less expensive junior resources to answer routine support call or small system improvements.  Even with small amounts of turnover, heavily driven senior people projects are difficult to maintain continuity as knowledge and experience of the project is isolated to fewer resources. 
• Our Firm – When senior resources drive the bulk of billable activities, profitability is affected in the short-term as senior resources are difficult to obtain for growth and junior resources are not learning and experiencing what they need to become senior resources.  Culture is also severely affected as junior resources feel unneeded and senior resources are overworked.  Lastly, the transition of knowledge and repeatability of success is impacted as senior resources are not shared across projects resulting in one-off success and future failures.

Hire and Train Rather Than Just Hire

In building IT services for the current competitive environment for IT personnel, growing firms need to embrace that, in order to grow, additional resources will be required.  For small and young firms, the best way to grow is to hire experienced resources from personal networks.  As firms age and grow, these networks become more difficult to expand meaning more time (and money) has to be allocated to attracting and retaining experienced resources.

Hiring inexperienced resources with a focus on training provides many benefits including:

• Inexperienced resources are easier to hire and typically have lower costs
• Inexperienced resources are able to adopt and enhance your company’s culture and less likely to bring baggage from their time at previous companies
• Inexperienced resources bring fresh eyes and energy.  Younger employees view the tasks that others deem “mundane” (like testing) as learning opportunities.
• Inexperienced resources are excited and grateful to engage in new learning experience, rewarding the firm that provides it with increased loyalty, other recruit, referrals and outstanding client service.
• Health care costs are typically smaller with inexperienced employees. One interesting effect we noticed from Obama Care was that more than 50% of our employees under the age of 26 were opting not to join our health care as they were covered by their parents health-care.

Underdelegation – Addressing the Incentive Issues

While it is easy to see how turning inexperienced resources into experienced resources can benefit the person, client and culture in the long-run, there are multiple incentives that make it difficult in the short-run including:

• Cost: In the short-term, it is easy to see that training and bringing in the inexperienced resource will cost more since, even if the rates are smaller, it will take the resource longer to complete the task.  Add on the additional supervision and, in the short-term, the cost can be greater in the short-term.
• Reward for Coaching/Training: Too often, firms have compensation goals for consultants that tie bonus to individual billable hours.  It is difficult to reward for good coaching/training if delegating a task will result in smaller bonus for the individual.
• IT Wizard/Martyr: The IT reward of getting something working or solving difficult problems is a motivation for many technical resources.  It can be difficult to break the incentive for senior resources to delegate this boost of dopamine.

Fixing each of the above issues requires a daily commitment to addressing each of the incentives. 

• Cost: While it may cost more to bring in a junior resource in the short-term, cost impacts are more than outweighed by the savings in the long-term as junior resources field more and more of the support, development and management issues of the senior resource.  One strategy management can use to support delegation is to volunteer writing-off any overage associated with adding of resources if required as the cost of all the resources, particularly unbillable junior resources, is typically a sunk cost.
• Reward for Coaching/Training: Firms need to move away from individual billable goals as, typically, resources are not always in control of their own billable hours.  Billable bonuses allow experienced resources to focus on what they like to do (code, technical) and away from what needs to be done (coaching, marketing, client relationship).  See our post on team rather than individual bonuses to encourage delegation and coaching.
• IT Wizard/Martyr – Rewarding and recognizing the individual over the team has significant ramifications on culture and delegation.  From the process of recruiting to banding/evaluation, resources should be rewarded for their training and development of resources rather than just their individual work.

Daily Staffing Huddle – Where It All comes Together

While there can be agreement on why delegation is important, experienced resources will often make daily decisions to under-delegate based on the above incentives during typical project management.  Growing firms need a way to enforce delegation and development goals to avoid these under-delegation decisions.  One of the best ways to reinforce delegation goals is a daily staffing huddle with the experienced managers.  The goal of a daily staffing huddle is to appropriately staff resources where needed by clients on a daily basis.  Some points for the huddle to avoid under-delegation include:

• Once a week (recommend Monday morning – 1 hour), a longer huddle to discuss every resource in the firm and what they will be working on this week.  The huddle begins with a review of billable hours versus forecasted hours from the previous week to enforce delegation goals as well as call-out managers that might be under-delegating.  Forecasted billable hours per resource will be presented starting with the inexperienced resources (hoping for 80-100% billable) and moving to the experienced resources (50-70%).  Benefits include all managers knowing who is working on what with input from any previous managers and mentors.  The goal should be to staff inexperienced resources first with a push to all managers to “find” hours for those inexperienced resources that need work.  Internal development and other quarterly goals are also typically discussed to find productive work for unbillable resources.
• Daily Huddle (15 minutes) – To review previous days billable hours and revise staffing based on client needs that might have arisen the previous day.  The huddle will begin with a review of the billable hours the previous day by individual.  This will require resources to enter hours every day (a best practice).  Resources that were forecasted to be billable but were not should drive discussions amongst the managers on why there was a difference for that day to determine if the resources can correct their time report or become more billable.

Conclusion – Addressing the Objections

Tying back to our initial objections:

• “I know we are behind and I don’t have time to add additional people to the project”

During the huddle, have all managers suggest ways to add additional people; – Volunteer to write-off the cost if the client won’t pay for it (hopefully rare); – Find creative ways to mix in both experienced managers (from the huddle) as well as inexperienced resources.

• “The client only wants our most experienced people staffed on the project”

The key to balanced staffing is an understanding that the client doesn’t get to pick and choose who is assigned to the project.  Often this sentiment can be reinforced by managers looking to cherry pick only the best people.  Staffing needs to be a strong player staffed only when they can be balanced out with a weaker player.

• “I could get this done quicker myself”
• “I prefer to do this myself”
• “I have more confidence in this getting done if I do it myself”

The huddle needs to push away from the IT Wizard/Lone Wolf/Martyr.  While experienced resources like to do many of the low-level things in IT services, they typically don’t like to do all of the testing and support required once the complex issues are solved.  Work on a role/responsibility where the managers  get some of what they like doing want without the burden of support.

• “I didn’t include junior people in my estimate”

Estimates need to be completed for the team. The firm includes junior people with cost incentives for clients based on rate and staffing mix.  Understanding that both “Estimates are always wrong” as well as “Plan the work, work the plan”  needs to address the flexibility of moving from estimate to completion. This will always involve creativity in staffing, client communication, approach and many other factors.

In my experience, overcoming managers’ and clients’ objections to taking on experienced staff can be easily overcome by a motivated manager team that understands the long-term goals of both the company and the client.  Below is a favorite quote given to me early in my career from one of my Arthur Andersen/Accenture partners: 

“When someone says they are too busy to take on a new resource, I force them to take two. Two weeks after you add the people you can’t imagine what you’d do without them.” (Marie Campagna)