This article is written by Rell DeShaw, Government of Canada.

  • The problem: You are drowning in work and don’t have enough team members to get it all done.
  • Why it matters: Your strong work ethic isn’t enough to help when you just have too much to do. You need some deliberate strategies for a re-set.
  • The solution: You assessed the ‘must dos’ in part 1, now move on to assessing your capacity and if needed, making a pitch for a re-set.

In part one of this series, we discussed diagnosing why you think you are in a pickle, clarifying mandate and ‘must dos’. Now we will discuss trying to ‘right-size’ your existing commitments, assessing capacity, and finally, if needed, making the pitch for a re-set.

You’ve assessed the ‘must dos’, now move to assessing capacity

Once you clarify the mandate and the must-do list, and have clarified musings vs. taskings, next you can also assess if the core work must be completed in the way originally envisaged.

Take a step back: I have found engaged public servants ruthless about getting the job done as well as their pursuit of taking their products to the top level. This is a testament to the calibre of our workforce and their work ethics. That said, when you are underwater, this might be the moment to take a step back and see if expectations can be re-calibrated.

Firstly, think about whether you can rescale one or more of your projects. Assuming you still need to deliver, think about how to make (and show) progress while re-considering your original level of ambition.

Showing progress versus completion: I remember one time in my career when the big boss made several requests around advancing the implementation of a large project and my stress level was rising. He was making reasonable requests but we needed more time to do the detailed mapping that he was requesting. I began to wonder if we could do just as much to assuage his asks by trying to address an underlying concern and entering the ‘reassurance’ space by showing progress versus completion. In the end, I was able to engage another team that had specialisation in managing projects to ask if they could help us mock up an implementation tracker prototype for us to show to the big boss. Though the prototypes were not filled with actual project information, the big buckets of work were there and he could see the plan to fill it in. We would then shortly have access to instant, detailed updates on the big project. In the end, this decision to show our progress, was enough to satisfy the short-term asks.

Less but as good: Can you meet the deliverable with less - not lower quality but a shorter paper? A proof of concept? One slide infographic instead of a full presentation? An oral briefing rather than a PowerPoint?

What’s the delta between work and capacity?

After you have clarified your core tasks, you may now be able to do an audit of what a reasonable work package looks like for each member of your team given their level and experience. With luck, this can be mapped out fairly easily.

Then you’ll have some idea of the delta between work and capacity at this point. This means that you’ll have some sense of whether you have enough staff, enough money in the budget to have enough staff (if only you could find them), or whether you need to make a case for additional staff.

You may also realise at this point that you have a mismatch between your staff and the skills that you need for your core work and a developmental conversation with staff members may be needed.

In other cases, one tier of the organisation has grown without consideration of the capacity in the corresponding management layers. This can be called the ‘span of control’ for a manager. Simply, do you have too many direct reports for you as a manager? In general terms, operational units may have larger spans of control. Possibly your classification group in HR can support you in understanding an appropriate span of control for your group. If not, you may be able to examine other units in other departments doing similar work for comparison.

After going through some of these exercises, you may indeed see that you are short on resources to deliver on your work. The next section is about making a pitch for a re-set.

Making a pitch for a re-set

Making the case for more funding: After you have completed your assessment of work vs. resources, it may be time to make the case for more funding. Some organisations have special pots of money set aside for temporary salary or operations budget pressures that you can access. In other cases, you may have to seek new permanent funding through an appropriate funding mechanism. If neither of these avenues are open to you, you may have to go back to your MoSCoW analysis and make the case that you need to stop doing something.

How to make the pitch: It is difficult when you feel you have to give some difficult news or fight an uphill battle and you think you don’t have enough credibility or influence to succeed.

Attunement: I am a big fan of a writer called Dan Pink who wrote a book called To Sell Is Human. Pink reminds us early in the book that we are all selling - even your dentist is selling you on why you should floss. One idea he recommends is that you connect with ‘attunement’ to the needs of others. In this case, think about what your boss cares about (what do they mention a lot?) and see if you can tune into that when you make your pitch for where you think you should focus versus things to push out to a later date. In addition, think about how you are going to present your pitch so that it will land for that person. If your boss is a numbers woman, pull out those metrics - she may be surprised and interested to hear that your customer service mailbox is now receiving 400 emails a day even though last year it was only an average of 150 per day.

Find allies: It is unlikely that you are alone in having too much work. With luck, your manager colleagues can support you in your aim to align work with resources by chiming in from their own perches.

Read Part 3 of this series here.

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