You're drowning in IT tasks. Can delegation help you focus on high-priority projects?

Performing a task triage is essential in IT to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. Beyond categorizing tasks, it's also beneficial to regularly reassess and adjust priorities based on evolving project demands and resource availability. Utilizing task management tools can streamline this process, providing a clear overview of progress and helping to identify any bottlenecks. Encouraging continuous skill development within your team can also empower them to handle more complex tasks over time, further optimizing workflow and allowing you to focus on strategic initiatives.

When you have several tasks to deal with, you should rank them by their priority, considering the deadline you have to deliver that task and how many time should you spend on doing it. If you have much tasks and less time to deal with it all, you need to consider some strategies such as delegation or even renegotiate deadlines.

Saying you need to triage and then coming up with a useful means of doing so are different based on my observations. I have found that categorizing tasks by a combination of relative sizing (complexity and effort), impact of not doing it, and alignment with strategic goals to be an effective matrix in helping me to determine how they should be prioritized. This creates a backlog that I can review with my team and see who is interested in accomplishing what, especially now that I can answer why each item is important. If not everyone picks something or partners up to accomplish something it helps to highlight potential growth opportunities and encourages opening dialogue around why not.

If you are on a leadership position, you should consider delegation, because when you have a huge number os tasks to deliver, you will not be able to do all of this alone and in time. You should undestand your team and their skills, then you could send some of that tasks to them. It is a good practice to track the tasks progress. The benefit will be a more specialized team over the time and decentralization of tasks that only you could deal with.

Far too often I have witnessed those in leadership roles get bogged down in the weeds instead of helping to design, cultivate, and refine the vision and strategies that the organization should be driving towards. By focusing on tasks that truly need your expertise, you ensure that your time is used effectively either by providing that north star or acting as an impediment removal engine for your people who are trying to get work done and encounter road blocks. Another benefit is upskilling in those involved in the delegation. Doing new things and having ownership of them helps in building their capabilities and confidence, leading to a more skilled and autonomous team.

In my experience, delegation should be a confidence step of a leader with their team. Do not forget to track the progress and even to train your team on doing new kind of tasks.

Assess your team's skills, experience, and workload first. While one could argue that choosing the right person to delegate tasks to is key, I would insist on allowing and encouraging your team to volunteer first. Balance task complexity with their abilities to encourage success, but don't shy away from failure as it is a valuable part of continued improvement. In this vein, do not hesitate to let less experienced members take on challenging tasks for growth. Clear communication is essential—set expectations and provide resources and support. Regular check-ins help keep everything transparent. If something is going to fail; fail fast and do not be surprised so that you may pivot on to the next priority taking away lessons learned.

Every task that you could handoff would give time to face another priority task. We need to remember that when we handoff a task, we need to contextualize correctly the person who will take the responsability for this new task.

If you cannot have a face-to-face conversation for a clean hand-off, then write up a "too long did not read" (TLDR) summary with a target audience of someone fresh off the street. Why? If you can do that than you are able to provide anyone understanding of what it is and what still needs to be done. Yourself included if you ever have to come back to it weeks, months, or years later. Would future you want to read a novella? Would future you know what you meant by a five word summary? The answer is empathically no to both and you know it. Take the time to write up a summary that is 144 characters or less, you'll thank yourself later.

Some times we delegate tasks and forget that the another person also have their own tasks to deal with. As a leader, you should track the tasks and progress of your team members and support them on their impediments, provide feedback, and also helping them to reprioritize their tasks.

Data is rad and information radiators are amazing! Just because someone else is doing the work does not mean it should evaporate into the void. you should encourage your team to find a common information radiator that works best, whether it is a Kanban board, scrum board, project tracker, shared task list, et cetera. Check in with one another often and briefly so that the focus of the conversation is not a complete download, but rather an opportunity to highlight progress or hinderances that could require assistance. Do not weaponize these discussions, check-ins, or updates or you will see whatever trust and good will you have cultivated vanish faster than a drop of water on a hot skillet.