Delegation for Management Consultants & Managers

In this lecture, I will briefly discuss what you can expect in the course

Here I will show you what to do if a blurry image appears

Here I will show you how to find additional resources attached to the course like Excel files, presentations, links, etc.

· In the second section, we will discuss essential concepts. We will see who should delegate work, what kind of work you can delegate and what types of delegation you can use.

Delegating is a nice fancy concept that managers keep talking about without telling you why it is so important. Let’s just see what are the real benefits of delegating work to others.

For some groups of people, delegation is a must. Quite often people tend to forget that their role and style of work has to change as they become managers.

There are some misconceptions about what you can delegate to others. Let’s briefly have a look at things that you can safely delegate

Whether you clean, cook, wait in the line you are effectively using your precious resource that is also limited – the time. Time like money is limited and you can exchange between each other. Calculating the value of your time is the next step that will help you save money.  We will discuss it in this lecture.

Let’s imagine that you want to help Maria use her time wisely. Therefore, you want to show how much she invests in daily things expressed in money.

In this lecture, I will show you the solution to the previously introduced case study.

You can use the value of time for 3 things

1. Make-or-buy analysis

2. Spend less

3. Earn more

We will discuss it in this lecture

We are back to Maria. Using the previous case study we will try to decide which activities she should delegate using the make-or-buy analysis.

Let’s move to examples of delegating work. We will look at 2 case studies

• Delegating work in consulting

• What NOT to do as a manager / CEO

At some point, all of the tips I have mentioned will be not enough if you want to really scale up what you do. For this, you will need to delegate some work and I will show you when and how to do it properly.

Your work as a Project Manager is totally different than the work of a business analyst or consultant. A good project manager doesn’t work directly. He manages people and relations

The best way to explain what is your role is to show to concentrate on and what to avoid and this is what I will try to do in this lecture

In this section, we will look at case studies that will help you delegate work. We will discuss fast and gradual delegation, as well as how you can select the right person to perform the task.

If you want to delegate work, you have to define the following things

• Time

• Rough solution

• Complexity level

• Resources

Let's imagine that Anna has to prepare a report about the kid's fashion industry in European Union (EU). Help here define the work so she can delegate it.

Imagine that Jack would like to carry out a small renovation and paint walls. Let’s have a look at what he should prepare before he will delegate the work.

There are two paths that you can take when you delegate work. In the next few lectures, I will show you how you can use them in practice

In this section, we will talk about the two following paths of delegation

• Gradual delegation

• Fast delegation

Gradual delegation helps you control the situation and make sure that the work will be done according to your standards. Let’s discuss when and how it can be used.

Let’s imagine that a small company that creates online courses would like to increase the number of created courses. Let’s have a look at how they can do it by gradually delegating work.

Fast delegation is a different beast. In fast delegation, you hand over the whole work to somebody. You still should try to make sure that the work is done according to your expectations.

Imagine that you are helping a CEO of a cosmetics firm. You would like to hire two new Directors. Let’s have a look at how you can use the fast delegation path in this case study.

Now let’s devote some time to decide who should you delegate to the work. We will discuss the general framework of how to select the right person or firm to do the job.

Creating an expansion strategy requires you to do a number of things. I will show you in this lecture how to approach this subject

In this lecture, I will start the case study that we will be solving for the next few lectures. Imagine that you are a Spanish fashion retailer and you want to figure out which countries you should enter. Therefore, you prepare a ranking of countries that show attractiveness and the size of each and every market.

In this lecture, we solve the previously introduced case study.

Let's imagine that the Pharmaceutical company can’t decide to whom to delegate the creation of the PMO department. Let's have a look at how we can select to whom to delegate this.

In this section, I will show you how to 10x your team efficiency

If you want to have an effective team you should know what you want and implement it. The first step is to create the profile of an ideal team member.

Consulting is teamwork so you have to define what values you want your team to follow. This is crucial as it will be something that will be the basis for the team culture. In this lecture, I will show my values that provide a good ground for managing properly the consulting project.

As we discuss previously you want to turn inexperienced graduates into seasoned consultants. This gives you greater chances of success during the project. Therefore, you have to define the profile of an ideal consultant and set your team member on the course to achieve this level. In this lecture, I will also show you the profile I have defined for an ideal team member.

If you want the team to work as one efficient body you have to facilitate communication between them. This means especially that you should set standards, create templates and modules so that you create similar end-products.

You have to make your team constantly improve to get a self-improving machine for work. In this lecture, we will discuss how to achieve it.

In this lecture, I will show you how you can teach your team members efficiently

Once you have set the rules and standards it’s time to make sure that the team works efficiently. In the next lectures, I will talk about few concepts that are very useful in managing a team. I will also give you an example from managing a team during a consulting project

One of the biggest problems for efficiency is the so-called Parkinson’s Law – Work expand so as to fill the time available for its completion. People when asked to evaluate the time certain things will take build-in buffers. One of the ways to deal with it is the so-called Critical chain. Here I will show you what it is

In this lecture the tools and ways in which you should manage your team. I will also show you how your daily schedule should look like

Here I will show you an example of managing a team in practice. I will use a team of project managers for this example

One of the biggest problems in team management is the problem with too narrow specialization and bottlenecks. In this lecture and the next one, I will talk about ways how to deal with them.

Bottlenecks are one of the biggest threats in making faster meaningful work. In this lecture, I will explain briefly what it is and how to find it. I will show you as well as practical examples.

You have to use all the strengths of your team and at the same time find a way to capture them into something more tangible. That is why it is important to have a system to collect knowledge from your team.