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Problem 3 of 4

Leadership

Busywork increases faster than the work itself.

As delivery speeds up, decisions, escalations, and replans multiply. Each one pulls in project managers, product managers, functional managers, and team leads. Setting direction and developing people keep getting pushed back.

See how one slip spreads

The plan becomes brittle

Every slip becomes a round of replanning.

One project slips two weeks. Some plans depend on it directly; others move when those plans move. You might have planned some buffers but they can only absorb so much. Eventually the delays cascade.

Rebuilding the plan pulls in project, program, product, and team leads to agree on new dates, reworked budgets, and the fresh commitments they will need to explain. And the next slip usually lands before the last replan is finished.

An illustrative cascade. Identity slips 2 weeks. App shell and Payments API wait on Identity. Pricing model and Mobile checkout wait on App shell. Express checkout waits on Payments API. Subscriptions waits on Pricing model. Each plan moves 1 or 2 weeks, depending on its slack. The launch moves from week 12 to week 14. One slip, 7 plans to rebuild.

The coordination tax grows

Coordination crowds out direction.

Between the replans come the smaller calls: which thing first, can we change the scope, is this ready to ship. Each is quicker to answer than to explain, so the team learns to ask, and your attention becomes one more shared dependency.

A 2016 Accenture study asked 1,770 managers across 14 countries where their time went. Administrative coordination and control accounted for 54%; strategy and innovation for 10%. This is an older, cross-industry survey, not a current benchmark for software leaders. Nor is every administrative task waste. The question is which recurring decisions your teams could make with the right context and authority.

Read the study in Harvard Business Review ↗
How managers spend their time: administrative coordination and control 54 percent, problem solving and collaboration 30 percent, strategy and innovation 10 percent, developing people 7 percent. Accenture survey of 1,770 managers in 14 countries, published in Harvard Business Review, 2016.

The ZeroBlockers approach

Give teams authority. Own the conditions.

When managers are accountable for outcomes, the first reaction is always to control the inputs. But that is what leads to the overhead burden. Conversely, delegating without conditions is abdication of responsibility and setting the teams up for failure. Delegating with guardrails is the sweet spot.

  1. Give teams the context.

    Share the strategy and the reasoning behind it, then check the team can reason with it. Certify the thinking instead of briefing the plan.

    Change 5 of 6: Alignment

  2. Agree the guardrails. Review the outcome.

    Name the limits before the work starts and the measure you will judge it by. The team states what it intends to do and why, and the review looks at what moved.

    Change 3 of 6: Governance

  3. Build the capability.

    Delegation is safe when the skill is there. Enabling teams, standards, and apprenticeship close the gap, starting with a bounded scope that widens as the evidence comes in.

    Change 6 of 6: Scaling