Management Nugget No 21: Do not delegate the small stuff.

This is something that I personally find drives me crackers, and has done all the way through my professional career, it is also one of the golden rules that I apply now that I spend more time doing management stuff than I do doing technical or support stuff. It is to not inappropriately delegate. What do I mean by inappropriate? In this case, I mean to delegate items that do not have clear owners and therefore, often, managers delegate to anybody they can find rather than just doing it them selves. The worst case for this is to delegate administration tasks to subject matter experts. The classical one is, if you are running a project and you are running a lot of meetings within that project, but have no project office member, or scrum master or general admin, you ask technical specialists or Business Analysts to do admin tasks such as minute the meeting or raise requests Unless there is a hard dependency on a skill set they use, do not waste the time of specialists on such things. I personally believe all minor admin actions fail back on the project manager in the absence of anyone else. If you feel that you are ill equipped to do such administration items because you do not understand the subject matter. For example, to raise a ticket that you don’t know the process for or that requires complex technical details to fill in, you initially take it as your job. Then you ask one of your fellow managers to assist, to see if they can help you. If that fails, then you go and ask one of the subject matter experts if they can guide you through the process the first time so you can learn. In summary, if in doubt, all boring and dirty jobs become the project managers responsibility. Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.