Understanding how to efficiently assign tasks to help guide your team’s clear objectives into actionable steps that can lead to ownership and accountability. Clear task assignment and planning often lead to better outputs per individual, on-time deliverables, and increased morale. From a managerial perspective, it helps to eliminate redundancy, reduces bottlenecks, and establishes clear ownership of deliverables.
In every sector that uses some sort of structured task assignment mechanisms and reporting, organizations report an increase in productivity overall up to 25 percent, an on-time project delivery increase of 30 percent as well as a 20 percent reduction in wasted time due to unclear responsibilities. There has been a big improvement because task assignments are perfectly matched to each team member's talents and expertise and connected with the organization's goals. This has led to fewer distractions and better focus.
Task assignment means figuring out what needs to be done for a project and then giving those jobs to the right people on the team. The human resource department decides who gets what based on what they are good at, what they have done before, how busy they already are, and what's most important for the company.
Effective task assignment is about breaking a project down into smaller and smaller tasks, estimating time, effort and complexity, and assigning tasks to people that are best suited for the task at hand. In this case it is not simply passing on the job description - which is a common occurrence, but setting out the organization objectives for the task, assigning a due date, and developing acceptance criteria for the task.
This task process eliminates any ambiguity about who is doing what and when. It establishes ownership and accountability and ensures every team member knows the scope of their task and how they can contribute to shared goals.
When the task assigned fits within the organization's priorities, everybody benefits with more agility, enhanced quality of outputs and improved effectiveness overall. Poor task assignment wastes time, causes missed deadlines, and reduces employee satisfaction.
Clear task assignment provides many benefits including:
Hypothesize team member's background, skill sets, credentials/certifications and past experience with similar tasks. Give team members tasks that play to their strengths, fill in gaps, & don't put too much strain on less experienced team members.
If you measure current assignments and number of hours logged by the team, you are not going to overload a team member or find that they are working on multiple assignments at the same time. If workloads are evenly distributed all members are more productive, stay focused and will not be stressed to the point of being burnt-out.
Consider the level of impact to the organization and how soon the business is affected; sequence tasks based on impact. Hence you ought to prioritize the tasks that have the tightest delivery milestones over those assignments that are lower impact.
Some tasks depend on completing other deliverables, so to mitigate the risk of wasted time and resources, assign the tasks that are inter-related to the same team member or to team members that work closely together so that you do not delay handoffs or communications.
You ought to assign development (stretch assignments) to team members individually based on their career aspirations. Providing opportunities to extend learning experience as part of a task assignment increases employee engagement and can help retain top talent.
Track projects using dashboards, kanban boards, or Gantt charts to display the status of every task. These are definitive, so the risk of confusing the status of tasks is low. Make sure to update frequently. The only time you can gain visibility into a project that is running late is to look at the dashboards on an ongoing basis and let the proper stakeholders know as soon as possible.
Regular brief stand-ups or one-on-one meetings allow teams to review and discuss blockers and reassign if necessary. Reviewing work completed and highlighting wins motivates and encourages accountability.
Provide timely constructive feedback regarding completed tasks. Recognize successes publicly to reinforce positive practices and motivate teams.
Business dynamics change. Be prepared to review and alter assignments, reassignments and deadlines as priorities shift and/or information changes.
Use Time Champ's reporting capabilities to track and compare estimated and actual time spent on tasks to identify bottlenecks, delay patterns, and workload imbalances, and refine the task assigning process through a new lens.
By applying these principles, thousands of chaotic to-do lists can be refined into a deliberate, gradual pathway of accountability, clarity and high performance; across your team.
