Delegation and team formation for researchers
10 August 2013
If you go over most books on delegation, they will tell you that in order to delegate you have to make sure that the person you are delegating to has to have at least three main characteristics: Has to be willing, has to have the time, and has to have the ability.
This is all nice in theory, but in practice the problem is that when you start working with somebody you will usually not know whether this person has these characteristics.
What's the solution then? One possibility is to follow an Agile approach, where tasks are given to somebody in small chunks, and then followed up in an iterative manner. For example, if the task is to do the data management, give the person a tiny chunk of data to be cleaned and then follow-up. If the three criteria were met for that task, then scale up and check.
The other aspect of delegation that is often not mentioned, is that delegation is not about passing tasks to others but instead it is one of the first steps in creating a research team. In other words, if the person can complete a task and keeps moving up in terms of difficulty, then this is a dependable member of your team.
by Ricardo Pietrobon
About Me
My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.
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