Real-life tasks tend to be relatively long, but they usually have short constituents that are homogeneous and require the same skillset and form of activity.
For example, a longer task can have parts that require attendance at a given hour and other parts that can be handled at any time of the day.
The required skills might be different, the equipment needs can differ, and the required language skills can vary.
While one person can of course do these as part of their job description, there are clear benefits of reviewing full-time positions with short subtasks in mind.
A sales example
Your salesperson might best be deployed directly with clients. Cleaning the data to be used for lead generation can be done by someone else, by a person whose strengths lie in working with data. This allows the salesperson to work in the area they are good at, and your data analyst in the area that person is good at.
Similarly, most data analysis and preparation can be done any time of the day, while client-related work is probably governed by the working hours of clients.
Many data analysis tasks can be broken down to smaller parts and handled by multiple people, while a single client is perhaps best contacted by the same salesperson to maintain the consistency of the experience on your client’s end.
You might even need special skills from time to time. For example, a little bit of coding can speed up a given part of your task, while most likely there is no need to involve people skilled at Python in most of the other tasks.
The drawbacks of conventional skill allocation
Full-time positions usually try to bundle similar tasks together, constrained by the requirement to properly assign 30 or 40 hours of weekly work to a single full-time employee.
Consequently, tasks are assigned to people whose strengths lie elsewhere, resulting in lower performance and burnout. Even if a relatively good task allocation is achieved, holidays and fluctuations can easily upset the balance.
Why do we at Broadstone.io think in terms of 15-minute tasks?
When working with us, we encourage our clients to break down their positions into homogenous tasks that are short, even as short as 15 minutes.
There are numerous benefits to this approach:
- You can free up highly skilled colleagues from tasks that would otherwise drag them down.
- You are not forced to “bolt on” residual tasks to any position.
- If the task itself allows, you can even forego the 9 to 5 and the Monday to Friday schedules, as well as the limitations posed by public holidays.
- The tasks outsourced are handled without interruptions, even if substitution is needed.
While each of these short tasks is homogeneous, they form a diverse batch that can be outsourced. Diverse in terms of timing, diverse in terms of handling in parallel, and diverse in terms of skillsets.
Best of all, if you need to make changes, you can easily increase or decrease the number and nature of outsourced tasks as you see fit.
Whenever hiring a new person or changing the roster/duty lists, it is a good opportunity to reassess tasks this way.
