Marketing at the reporting service produces eight pieces a week: ads, emails and examples for the website. The owner has time to approve three. Twenty finished pieces are waiting. Someone proposes another designer: "Marketing is always late." But the new person would feed the same approval queue.
This is the service for small retail chains from the strategy lesson; the situation's figures are made up. Its monthly model has 400,000 ₸ of fixed expenses for marketing, sales, management, premises and shared services. Before hiring, decide what work the team must deliver and what the new person will cost.
Trace one piece of work
Take several recent pieces and reconstruct the dates: request, completed brief, work started, first version, approval handoff, edits and publication. Record working time separately from waiting. A piece designed in an hour and approved a week later needs a different solution from one that took a week of revisions.
There is no shared queue if "ready" means different things. The designer counts a layout with a temporary price; the marketer is waiting for copy; the owner sees an unconfirmed promise. Approval handoff therefore needs the final offer, verified numbers, a clear format and a source for the terms.
The delay may start before production. The owner has not chosen a segment, sales has added a service, or product has not confirmed the pilot schedule. Another designer speeds up the layout but cannot make those decisions. Record which decision each task awaits and who owns it.
Calculate flow and backlog
If pieces are comparable, arrivals and approvals cover the same week, and nothing is cancelled, the queue grows by 8 - 3 = 5 pieces. Twenty becomes 25. At that rate, four weeks produce a queue of 40: 20 + 4 × 5. This calculates flow rather than rating individual productivity.
Continually making eight pieces when only three can be approved is also costly because terms change. A month later, finished copy may be outdated and need rework. Before accelerating output, sort the queue into current tasks, those needing updates and those that can be dropped.
Increasing approvals to eight a week stops the queue growing, but the old twenty remain. Reducing them requires temporarily approving more, producing less or cancelling unnecessary tasks. Those are three different actions whose effects should be recorded separately.
Compare the cost of two options
For an estimate, assume each piece takes an hour valued internally at 5,000 ₸. Another four pieces a week require 20,000 ₸ of capacity, or 80,000 ₸ over four weeks. If approvals remain at three, twelve arrive and the queue grows by nine each week. Additional spending accelerates unfinished work.
Another option is to let an employee accept standard pieces within the agreed offer and reserve time for exceptions. Suppose preparing criteria and reviewing work takes two extra hours weekly: at the same valuation, 10,000 ₸ of capacity. This change has a testable aim: more accepted and published pieces at the same quality.
This is a time estimate, not a cash saving yet. If team salaries stay fixed, hours can go to other work, but money does not automatically return to the account. If a contractor is paid separately for part of the work, the budget includes the actual invoice. The hourly value compares use of capacity; it is not a market rate for a designer or manager.
After changing the process, track output, waiting, rework and errors in published pieces. Approval that is faster because wrong prices slip through is not a useful result. If the queue instead moves to production and blocks needed launches, the case for additional hours now has evidence.
What the team is missing
| Sign | Possible cause | Next step |
|---|---|---|
| Well-defined tasks wait for an available person | Too few hours | Drop lower-priority work, redistribute it or add capacity |
| Integrations repeatedly contain errors | Missing skills | Bring in a specialist or supported training |
| Finished work waits for one manager | Decisions have not been delegated | Separate standard decisions from exceptions |
| Every piece returns with a different offer | Terms were not agreed before work began | Fix the input brief and offer ownership |
| Everything depends on one employee | No knowledge transfer or backup path | Document the process and assign role-based access |
Several causes may coexist. A full calendar does not show where a hire is needed. A list of delayed work, its causes and consequences is more useful: which launch, customer response or check did not happen as a result?
Define the function before the title
The service wants messages after a pilot to run reliably. "We need a CRM marketer" is too broad without a defined outcome. The work needs an audience, entry and exit events, copy, exclusions, test records and error monitoring. Someone must agree the offer and contact conditions, someone must prepare the data, and someone must accept the finished journey.
The function owner keeps it moving without necessarily doing every part. A developer connects events, sales confirms deal states, and marketing prepares the message. A hiring decision depends on which work still lacks an owner or time after that review.
Atlassian's roles exercise compares expectations between teammates and identifies ownerless duties. A small company can record the result as work, doer, approver and backup. The approver must be someone who can settle the issue holding the work up, or the assignment remains nominal.
Staff, contractors and knowledge transfer
Ongoing product work needs availability and accumulated context. A limited integration may suit an outside specialist. A recurring part-time workload can be covered part-time. Choose the arrangement after describing the work, then establish quality through the result and acceptance method.
The cost includes more than the person's pay: tools, briefing, onboarding, review and absence cover. An agency invoice and one employee's salary may cover different work, so compare the same task scope first. An outside specialist still needs an internal client who makes business decisions.
Working accounts, source files and the change log must remain available to the company. The new role gets the access it needs, and handover to another person forms part of acceptance. Leaving that discussion until the last day before someone leaves is too late: the process will already depend on their memory.
Exercise: a resource request
Choose one recurring team activity and map its path from request to accepted output. Record working time, waiting, rework and owners. Prepare one process-change option and one additional-resource option, with costs and a comparison method.
For the lesson's queue, suppose delegated authority increases approvals to ten a week while production remains eight. Quality is unchanged, with no cancellations or rework. What happens to the queue of twenty, and how long does clearing it take?
After one week, 20 + 8 - 10 = 18 pieces remain. The queue shrinks by two weekly, so clearing it takes ten weeks at a constant rate. If the manager wants it cleared within a month, something else must change: temporarily reduce arrivals, add approval capacity or cancel outdated work. Another designer does not yet help achieve that goal.