Delegation: do not burn out — hire a manager

When an IT company has a lot of projects and the number of employees exceeds eight to ten, it’s time to start thinking about the organizational structure.

This is where the moment of delegation comes. How to do it right and avoid mistakes?

It is not easy to delegate a job, but you will have to

Proper delegation requires time and some effort on the part of the manager. It is especially difficult for those who were directly involved in the creation of software products, customer service or other tasks.

Delegation was repeatedly encountered as an emergency measure rather than a carefully prepared decision. The leader delays to the most critical point, not wanting to give subordinates part of the management functions.

If the company grows, the desire to keep everything under control will sooner or later become the cause of your “emotional burnout”. This is accompanied by excessive nervous tension, because you do not want, and can not, let the whole team down. So close to the common today “burnout”. Only when it comes you do realize that the consequences are much more serious than they seemed. And “this will never happen to me” also turned out to be a misconception.

Then you will go through the stages of breaking deadlines of orders, increasing tensions in the team, emergency searches for the project manager and the spontaneous transfer of certain obligations to him.

Think about whether it is worth bringing to all this, if you can systematically prepare for the emergence of management between you and the programmers, properly distribute the functions and find a good candidate in due time.

No matter how hard it is for you to part with the direct participation in the creation of a software product, but it is a must sooner or later. Otherwise, you will have to give up a number of projects, and hence further growth.

“Division of labor is the key to effective management. Effective delegation is the highest level of effective human activity, ”

Stephen Covey, Deputy Chairman of FranklinCovey.

A good manager for several profitable projects

Once you have decided to hire the first project manager, you have to deal with another nuance. Where to get an experienced, understanding, talented and suitable for your team?

Again, practice shows that several ways are possible:

1) take a qualified manager and help him adapt to the specifics of the IT business;

2) take a good look at the people who already work for you, maybe someone wants to move to the position of manager — he has the right abilities and, most importantly, the desire, but previously there was no chance to show up.

What exactly it is not necessary to do, is to appoint the manager of the employee compulsorily. It may seem to you that it is easy to manage the project, but a good technician is not always ready to become a leader.

There are many people who feel great being a subordinate. And if you change their role (make them give orders, monitor execution and be responsible for the results of the whole team), you can lose a great specialist.

“By dividing work into many individual sections and entrusting them to different workers, you can go so far that no one can imagine the process as a whole and the wheels will start spinning in the wind,”

Gates Bill, an American entrepreneur and one of Microsoft’s founders.

Option of effective organizational structure: 1 = 10

In the context of this topic, the questions are quite natural: when should you start preparing for the delegation? Which structure is best to choose?

Clearly, here it is necessary to rely on what works prevail in the company’s portfolio. This will help you choose from three organizational structures:

1) project structure, which is suitable for teams working on certain projects, but there must be a good recruitment manager;

2) linear structure, designed for medium-sized companies focused on developing solutions for specific segments or support (by the way, is most common among IT companies);

3) matrix structure — the most complex option, suitable for large companies with a large number of employees and complex projects.

It is worth thinking about any of them and studying in detail when there are more than 10 people in your subordination, because it becomes more and more difficult and less effective to control the 11th, 12th employee and all the others. Actually, the system is the following, 1 manager = up to 10 subordinates is good for building management levels, for example, in a linear organizational structure.

My conclusion is this: timely separation of management functions will help you get a much better result, minimize operational risks and run a business without losses both in the team and among customers.

Learn how to make people work: specificies, recommendations and methods

“I’d rather get 1% of the money from 100 people than 100% from my own efforts,”

Jean-Paul Getty, an American oil tycoon and industrialist, one of the first dollar billionaires in history.