So, you’re doing an Audit and it’s time to fill out your team allocation columns.

Here is some information on how you should think about each column to fill this out correctly.

The first question you should ask yourself is “how much of this role has been designed to be a part of one of the following three options:

  1. Delivery Team/Department
    1. This is the team that is carrying out services to your clients. This usually includes roles like consultants, designers, developers, copywriters, strategists, account managers, project managers (in some capacity), etc. If they are doing work for the client, we would consider them part of the Delivery Team.
  2. Sales and Marketing (S&M) Team/Department
    1. This is the team that oversees your sales funnel, lead generation, internal website, social media accounts, etc. They’re responsible for bringing new business into the organization.
  3. Admin Team/Department
    1. The admin team is anyone that is part of the administrative department (filling roles such as internal scheduling, paying invoices, legal, HR, Finance, etc.), along with those on the internal R&D team and management team.

Consider the following scenarios:

  1. Let’s say we’re a marketing agency, filling in the Payroll Grid, and we’re entering allocations for our Jr. Designer, Brian. Here is what we know about Brian:

    1. Brian spends almost all of his time on client work each day. He receives the project and the deadline, takes it back to the lab, and gets it done. The only time that Brian is not working on designs is when he is communicating with his co-workers on the topic of client work, at an internal status meeting or petting his dog.
    2. When times are slow, Brian might be asked to do some work on the company website or social media account, but this isn’t something he’s responsible for otherwise. It’s just something he might get pulled in to work on if there’s not enough client work to do.

    With this information, we can say for sure that Brian is 100% allocated to Delivery. His role isn’t designed to be part of the S&M team or the Admin team, so we allocate him to Delivery.

  2. Let’s say we’re the same marketing agency, but we’ll do a more complex scenario - our Sr. Designer, Sally.

    1. Sally spends a good amount of her days on client work. She has a very similar role to Brian in that she is expected to create designs for most of her days, but the big difference here is that Sally’s role is also designed to be responsible for social media assets for the agency’s Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Ideally, Sally spends 10% of her time on this work and the rest working on client projects.

    With this information, we would give Sally a 90% Delivery Team allocation and a 10% S&M Team allocation.

  3. Finally, a more complex scenario would be comparing Brian & Sally’s allocations to their Creative Director, Trisha.

    1. Trisha’s role has been structured so that she spends time in front of clients, puts the finishing touches on client work, and also manages the design team under her. It’s been structured for her to spend half of her time managing the team and the rest on client work.

    With this information, we can safely assign Trisha 100% to the Delivery team. Since Trisha is managing the Delivery team directly, and spending the rest of her time on Delivery work for clients, it’s all Delivery. Keep in mind that the lens that you should be looking at through while you go through this exercise is “ideal states” of the company in terms of what the roles have been structured to be. You can use “actuals” to influence your ideal states to ensure you’re setting realistic targets for these allocations. For example, if in the past, Trisha spent 10% of her time making designs for the internal S&M team, but her role hasn’t really been structured to include this (and in an ideal state she wouldn’t be doing any of that work) then you don’t need to reflect that 10% allocation in the Payroll Grid.

    Now that you’ve got a grasp on team allocations, you might want to refer to this post on choosing the right Delivery Hour Target for your team members.

    **ℹ️** If you have any other questions on the topic, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Parakeeto Account Manager so they’re able to give you the clarity you need!