If you work in a startup environment (less than 20 people), you will see yourself working not only on project manager's tasks, but also on business analyst's, sale's, etc...

Gradually, your company grows and it allows you to hire more people to support your team. Now it's the time you keep your core responsibilities and tasks and delegate the rest.

What should you keep? What should you delegate as soon as possible?

EDITED: In general, we do not have "right" answer for management questions like this. But I'm seeking answers either in 2 ways:

  • Answers that describe the approaches to the problem.
  • Answers that tell about real story/experience and the result.

You want to be the most efficient and effective person you can be, but you wear multiple hats. You know you need to give some up...how you decide which hats to give up?

1) Classify your Skills

Write a list of the skills/roles you perform eg:

  • Business Analyst
  • Programmer
  • Project Manager
  • QA Analyst
  • Business Administrator
  • Account Manager

2) Quantify your time allocation per skill

How much of your time that goes to each skill can help you identify which are time-eaters, which may be the hardest to "hand over" to someone else, or which are simply tasks you do on the side.

3) Rank your Skill/Effectiveness for each

Give yourself a ranking from 1 -> n that shows which skills you're best/most trained/experienced in and which you simply fill because no one else is there to do the job.

4) Review your Job Matrix and see what is best to drop

You'll end up with something like the following:

skills matrix

Ideally you'd want to drop the skills your the least skilled in to a quantity that frees up enough % of your time.

In the example above if I drop QA / Programmer / Account Manager work I free up 35% of my time dropping my 3 worst skills.

There's no "right" answer here - it's very subjective on the person and the organisation. But this method gives you an objective way of approaching the problem.

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