Delegating programming tasks – how SOPs help and hinder

Transcript

Delegating programming tasks – how SOPs help and hinder

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You are listening to the Effective Statistician Podcast, the weekly podcast with Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske designed to help you reach your potential, lead great science, and serve patients while having a great work life balance.

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Welcome to another episode of the effective statistician.

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Today we talk about how SOPs help or hinder your delegation of programming tasks.

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Now I learned to delegate programming just by more or less doing it.

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I don’t know about you, but I never had any kind of guidance how to do it in the best way.

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So I just worked together with the programmers, and then I read the SOPs and followed the SOPs.

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However, there’s much more to effective programming delegation than what is in the SOPs.

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I delegated more and more the programming tasks over time, up to the point where I even had no SAS license anymore, because all the tasks around programming, I delegated to other people.

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Now why did I do that?

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The first is it freaked me up, and I was not a bottleneck anymore.

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I had more time to do things that only I can do, and I think that is really important for you as you grow in your career.

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You are not rewarded by the hours that you spend, by the impact that you generate, and especially if you have opportunities to delegate programming, then I would use them as much as possible.

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And if you’re a programmer, then delegate everything that is more mundane to someone that is more junior, so that you can focus on the things that only you can do.

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Generally our organizations demand us to delegate because that means we have more effective use of resources.

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Usually we delegate to more junior people and that means also cheaper people just from an organizational point of view.

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Also if we delegate work those people that we delegated to these kind of assignments means that they need to develop themselves.

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We can also make sure that the right work goes to the right people.

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I wasn’t really very effective in terms of programming.

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There were lots of other programmers and also much more junior people than me that did programming much more effective.

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So therefore, putting the programming work to where it’s done in the best, the fastest, the effective, the most cost effective way absolutely makes sense from an organizational point of view.

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And lastly, of course, delegation makes outsourcing of work possible or subcontracting of work if you’re working in a CRO.

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All of these are important things that we need to consider why we actually want to delegate programming tasks in the first place.

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Now the foundation of delegation is to have trust trust in the person or in the group that we delegate the programming to.

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Trust is built based on care, competence, and character.

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And I talked about this quite a lot in some episodes in 2024 so scroll back There were three episodes about exactly these three components care, competence, and character.

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Now I wanna trust the person that I delegate to and I wanna have the feeling that they care for my success, that they are competent enough to do the assignment, and that they have the character to actually deliver.

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So that, of course, depends on what the scope is.

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Do you have just some very, very basic things to do, or are there much more complex analysis to be done?

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How big is the assignment?

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Is it just one table for demographics?

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Or is it a whole study?

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Or a complex simulation exercise?

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Or advanced technique like Bayesian borrowing?

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The bigger the scope of the task, the bigger the trust needs to be.

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And of course, the bigger the trust, the less oversight you need to do.

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And here’s the first problem with SOPs.

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They very often have a one size fits all approach.

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So you need to follow everything in the SOP irrespective of how much trust you have in the different persons.

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And I think that’s a limitation because, on one hand, if you very, very much trust the people, the SOPs demand for all kind of different things that are not necessarily need to be done.

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So it becomes a little bit of a red tape, a bureaucratic exercise.

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On the other hand, if you have a very junior person, well, the SOPs just state what you need to do from a minimal level.

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So usually you probably need to do even more what is not all in the SOPs.

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When you think about who you delegate to, you can have four different scenarios.

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The first is the person you delegate to doesn’t know what he or she doesn’t know.

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So that is unaware incompetence.

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In that case, think about an intern that you delegate something to.

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You need to direct them very, very closely what to do.

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Now once they understand what they don’t know, they become aware about their incompetence.

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Then you need to change your delegation style to coaching them and help them grow their competence.

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After that, they get into the third state, and that is they become competent and they are aware of that.

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Here, you can focus mostly on supporting them, helping them move forward because they know what they know.

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And finally you can fully delegate when they get to the last stage and that is they are unaware of their competence.

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Then they don’t even know already what all the different things that they know because they are so advanced.

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Then it becomes really, really easy.

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And of course, SOPs don’t take that usually into account now when you want to delegate there’s a couple of different things that you need to go through the first thing is to help them understand of course what is the final deliverable?

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What is the outcome that you want to achieve?

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The other thing that you need to make clear is why do you need this?

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The background.

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Here also very often SOPs fall short in that they don’t ask the person that delegates to clarify why is something needed.

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However, that is really important.

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Otherwise, it becomes very difficult for the person that has delegated the programming task to decide when to do what.

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What, for example, is a conservative approach?

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What to do if there is a gap in the specification?

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Can they decide on themselves?

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What would make sense?

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Of course, when you delegate, you need to speak about timelines.

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That’s pretty clear.

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And you need to speak about quality standards.

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Quality is not just what’s in the SOP but what is the expectation from those in your organization that you will deliver other stuff to.

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And here of course some SAPs have some variability in terms of, let’s say, allow different quality steps and that depends of course on what kind of decisions you will make, how you will use the data, all these kind of different things.

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But don’t just think about quality just in terms of I followed the SOP yes or no.

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The next point you need to mention in the delegation is any constraints.

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Are there any budget constraints?

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Any constraints in terms of the data that you use?

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Any other constraints?

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Certain you only need to use SARs or you should only use R or whatsoever.

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There can be multiple constraints.

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Mention these.

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And finally of course provide resources.

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Are there additional tips?

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Are there additional times where you are available?

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Is there maybe a senior programmer that can help?

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Is there a certain technical guidance?

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All these kind of different things.

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Lots of these things are not mentioned in SOPs.

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Just following the SOPs will not make you delegate well.

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And SOPs very often don’t allow flexibility around these things.

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However, that is very often needed and the SOPs very often just state the minimal approach.

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So sometimes you need to go beyond that.

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The next step in delegation is, of course, if you have the ability, select the right person based on their skill, their motivation for a specific task, and their growth potential.

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We’ll, say, develop based on this.

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You wanna give something that is mundane, maybe to a more junior person for whom that still is a growth potential and not to the most senior programmer that you have in your group.

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Don’t just assign based on who is available.

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That is a very, very bad approach.

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I see that all the time, that, okay, who has the least amount of work and work goes to that person.

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That’s not optimal.

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Another step that I can highly recommend if you delegate is use a back breathing technique.

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Ask what they have understood in terms of what you delegated to them.

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Not have you understood everything?

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Yes?

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No?

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No.

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Let them explain what they have understood.

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That will help you to identify any challenges that they have.

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It will help you to understand whether there were some kind of miscommunication, misunderstandings, and helps them support them so that they actually ask for help.

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Back briefing, I don’t see a lot in SOPs, so I would highly recommend that you do this irrespective of whether that is mentioned in your SOPs.

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Again, just because it’s not mentioned in the SOPs doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do it.

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Maybe you don’t must do it because it’s required from an audit perspective, but it still makes sense to do certain things.

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Finally, when you delegate, you also should provide feedback on what you have delegated.

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And that is not just feedback in terms of making comments in the draft TFOs or things like that.

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Provide feedback on what they have done well and what they can improve on.

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What is the impact of any kind of problems that they did or any kind of things that they did well?

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Don’t just focus on the mistakes.

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Focus on the things that went well as well.

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Overall don’t just rely on the documents you need to use per SOP.

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Just delegating using specifications, I think, is really a better approach.

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For anything that is bigger, have a discussion, maybe probably even for smaller things.

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At least have a five or ten minute chat about it.

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If you delegate a much bigger kind of project, then have a meeting and speak about the background.

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Help people to understand what kind of disease you’re talking about.

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I once delegated a series of studies to one zero and I arranged a meeting at the beginning where I help statistician zero staff to understand what this disease is about.

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What are typical things that I would see, which questionnaires should go up, which questionnaires should go down, what typical concomitant medications there would be, what dosing of medication, all these kind of different things so that they understand more about the background.

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That helps so much with the delegation process.

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However, that is usually not mentioned in SOPs.

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Still, it’s very, very effective to do these things.

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So overall SOPs very often give you some minimal requirements.

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They are very often one size fits all approaches and therefore you need to follow them, of course, but very often you need to do things beyond that.

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Don’t just rely on what’s in the SOPs.

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Do more to delegate your programming tasks effectively.

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By the way, in the medical data leaders community, we have a workshop that is only about delegation, not just about delegation of programming tasks, any kind of delegation.

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And if you wanna upskill your tasks, check out the Medical Data Leaders community on the Effective statistician homepage.

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We do these kind of workshops on a regular basis, and maybe there’s just a slot around this that is coming up.

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We also have many more workshops and webinars there that can help you improve your leadership skills in all kind of different ways.

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So check out the effectivestatistician.com and the medical data leaders community there.

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This show was created in association with PSI.

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Thanks to Reine and her team at VVS who helped put the show in the background, and thank you for listening.

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Reach your potential, lead great science, and serve patients.

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Just be an effective statistician.