Systemise Before You Hire

Overview

Headcount is the most common answer to a coordination problem, and often the earliest. The work is overwhelming, so someone is hired to absorb it. Sometimes that is right. It is rarely the first thing that should happen.

The sequence that works is: define the recurring work, write the rules, build the workflow, name the ownership, measure what human judgement is left, and then resource that deliberately.

Why hiring first is tempting

The pressure is real. Obligations are being missed, or nearly missed. The Principal is spending evenings on administration. An adviser is waiting on something nobody has sent.

Adding a person visibly addresses all of it, and quickly.

The difficulty is that an undefined role absorbs undefined work. Without rules, workflows or stated authority, the new person becomes a second memory rather than a system. They do the work, and the work stays personal to them.

Six months later the office runs on two people's memories instead of one. That is more capacity, but it is not more resilience.

The sequence

Recurring work. List what actually repeats. Monthly, quarterly, annually. Most offices find between fifteen and thirty recurring processes, and most have never been written down as a list.

Rules. For each one, what can happen without asking? A rule is what converts a question into an action.

Workflow. What are the steps from trigger to close, and what evidence does completion leave?

Ownership. Who is accountable for each process reaching completion? Not who does the tasks, who owns the outcome.

Measure residual human work. With rules and workflows defined, how much genuine judgement, relationship management and exception handling remains? This is the honest number.

Hire or outsource deliberately. Now the role can be defined against real work rather than against a feeling of being overwhelmed.

What the measurement usually shows

Two things tend to surface.

The first is that a meaningful proportion of the work was never judgement. It was routing, chasing, remembering and reconciling, and much of it can be rule-driven once the rules exist.

The second is that the judgement work is more concentrated than expected. It sits in a smaller number of areas, often requires more seniority than a generalist hire would bring, and is frequently better served by a fractional specialist than a full-time employee.

Both findings change what should be hired, and sometimes whether.

When to add people

This is not an argument against headcount. Some work genuinely needs a person, and under-resourcing is its own failure.

Add capacity when the residual work is real, recurring and sized for a role. When the volume of exceptions is genuinely beyond one person. When specialist judgement is needed often enough to justify retaining rather than engaging.

The difference is that the role is now defined by what it owns, with the authority to act, rather than by whatever happened to overflow.

What hiring into a defined system gives you

A defined role is easier to fill, because it can be described.

It is easier to hand over, because the system is documented rather than carried.

And it is easier to judge, because there is a stated expectation of what the role owns from trigger to completion.

An office that systemises first hires better people into clearer roles. An office that hires first usually ends up systemising anyway, later, around whoever it hired.

Frequently asked questions