Judgment work
Decisions, relationships, negotiation, design, diagnosis. This is what you hired the person for, and the whole point of the exercise is to protect and expand it.
Staffing analysis
Before the next hire, find out where the week goes.
A staffing analysis sorts every working hour on a team into judgment, coordination, mechanical work, and rework. The result tells you whether the honest answer is a new person, a re-deployed person, or a system.
The four buckets
Every hour lands in one of these
The split is deliberately coarse. Precision beyond four categories tends to produce debate rather than decisions.
Coordination overhead
Chasing status, scheduling, reminding, forwarding, translating between tools and teams. Necessary today, largely rule-shaped, and the first place capacity comes back from.
Mechanical work
Re-entry, copy-paste, formatting, exporting, assembling the same document again. Almost always automatable, almost never on anyone's job description.
Rework and waiting
Correcting bad data, redoing work that got lost, and idle time spent waiting on someone else's step. Usually a symptom of a process defect upstream.
Process
How the analysis runs
It is a measurement exercise, not a performance review. Nobody is scored; the process is. We say that out loud to every team before we start, because the data is only as good as people's willingness to describe how the work really happens.
Define the roles as they really are
Not the job posting — what the person did last week. We build a task list per role from interviews and, where useful, a short self-logged time diary.
Attach hours to each task
Frequency times duration, sanity-checked against calendars and system activity, so the totals reconcile to an actual working week instead of an idealized one.
Sort every hour into a category
Judgment, coordination, mechanical, rework/waiting. Disagreements about where a task belongs are productive — they're usually where the process ambiguity is.
Price the recoverable capacity
Loaded hourly cost applied to the automatable hours gives the annual figure, and the recoverable hours convert into fractions of a full-time role.
Answer the hiring question
Hire, re-deploy, or automate — per role, with the reasoning shown. Sometimes the answer is still hire, but for a different role than the one you were about to post.
What you get
- —An hours-by-category chart for each role on the team
- —A ranked list of tasks by recoverable hours per year
- —The loaded-cost figure attached to each recoverable block
- —A hire / re-deploy / automate recommendation per role, with reasoning
- —Draft role descriptions rewritten around the recommended split
- —A build sequence if you want the automations implemented
Questions it answers
- Do we need another coordinator, or do we need the coordinators we have back?
- Which role is closest to breaking, and is it volume or overhead?
- If we automate the top three tasks, how much of a headcount does that return?
- What would this team look like at double the deal volume with the same people?
- Which tasks should be in the next job description — and which should never be?
If you'd like a rough read before committing to anything, the quiz produces an estimate from twelve questions in a few minutes.
Take the quiz