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Engineering Principles
EP002 Distribute Work According to Skill

The Principle: Distribute tasks to team members based on skill level for the greatest efficiency.

For any given project, there will naturally be tasks of high and low skill levels. These tasks should be distributed by a manager to the team members according to their skill. The most difficult, ambiguous tasks should be given to the most experienced individuals, and conversely, the lowest skilled tasks should be given to those with the lowest ability.

Highly skilled individuals should make efforts to offload their lower skilled tasks to someone more suited to the work. Equally and oppositely, highly skilled tasks should not be performed by low skilled individuals with the goal of saving money. The result will be costly mistakes and increased liability. At a minimum, high skilled tasks should be performed with oversight and review from a highly skilled person.

Every minute a highly skilled person spends doing low skill work should be considered waste. A simple example: Let’s say a project takes 5 hours of skilled work at $2/hr and 5 hours of unskilled work at $1/hr. In the best case, it is a $15 project. In the worst (with no lower-skilled help), the cost is $20. Even if there is an imbalance of 1 hour (that is, 6/4) the cost is 6*2 + 4*1 = $16, which results in a 6.7% inefficiency. Many companies would kill to add profit margins in this range.

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There are 3 comments on this post
  1. EP003 Do the Hardest Thing First - TuningJohn
    June 13, 2020, 9:30 am
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    […] Previous Next John Marshall […]

  2. Dionysi
    June 15, 2020, 12:56 pm
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    This idea appears to be based solely on saving money. I wonder if the scope has become too narrow by focusing on saving money. If the less skilled individuals have potential (which is challenging to know), they will need to balance more challenging (and less time/cost efficient) work in order to improve their skills.
    This becomes rather complex quickly. Developing a less skilled worker into higher skilled will create less demand on high skilled individuals but will require higher incentives.

    • John Marshall
      June 18, 2020, 11:36 am
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      Great comment Dionysi. I think there’s two things at play here. First, raising the skill level of your team is going to help everyone all around. Underutilized talent and creativity can cause the whole team to suffer. The second thing I want to point out has to do with timeline. This principle is assuming you’re working on a project right now, and you have to do the best with what you have. There’s no time to train someone to be a skilled professional when the project is due next week.

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