How to reroute work tasks I cannot fulfill due to a lack of skills

November 13, 2024 12:29 PM

How can I redirect a task at work that I do not possess the skills to complete and cannot learn how to do in a timely manner? Sometimes I know it immediately, and sometimes it takes me a bit to find out. I usually say, "Hey, I don't think I'm going to be able to address this in a timely manner because it's not part of my wheelhouse. Could we delegate it to someone else on the team?" when I am working with a manager. Is this the right route?

Example scenario: I have been asked to address accessibility issues on a marketing website. This task requires an understanding of accessibility requirements, code overrides, and the website host (Framer) in general. I've already gotten two tasks totally wrong because despite my best efforts to learn as I go, I'm a visual designer, not a front-end developer!

I initially asked a developer colleague I don't know very well for guidance, but today I admitted to him that I am out of my depth and asked if he could please address the failed tickets instead of me so they're done correctly. I cannot tell if this is diva behavior. Is it okay to essentially say "I'm not the right person to do this," when asked to do something? Should I be trying harder?

I slept poorly last night because I hate inefficiency but dislike being viewed as incompetent even more.

posted by The Adventure Begins to Work & Money (10 answers total)

True incompetence is not knowing when you need to ask for help. You are competent.

In your shoes I would be saying to my manager “I investigated this and the right way to fix it is in the code. I do not know how to do that part of it.“
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:43 PM on November 13 [2 favorites]

Is this something a person in your position is supposed to know and you just don't or is this something that should have been assigned elsewhere to begin with. You say this is dev work and not design work. I know you said you are a designer, but does your title match that? If your title is just design and not dev, then you are not being a diva by saying this is too much dev work for just you to handle.

Accessibility is everyone's job to some degree when your team supports an interface. Making those changes is dev work, but deciding on what changes to make often includes the designers. It is common for issues to grow beyond the scope of what they seemed to be when first identified. Pulling in others is fine, but you have to be willing to do whatever you can to make their job easier. If you have been able to get anything done, even if it is just identifying a list of pages or elements that need to be changed, provide that to the person. If you have a ticketing system, make sure they get credit for their work.

This kind of inefficiency is not your problem; it is the person assigning work. No workflow is perfect, but you can usually learn something from every project.
posted by soelo at 12:47 PM on November 13 [1 favorite]

Tell Me No Lies: True incompetence is not knowing when you need to ask for help. You are competent.

Yes! Not knowing how to do things that aren't your job is not the same thing as incompetence. I actually think your current script is fine, just a little unspecific. Building on Tell Me No Lies's script, what about: "I investigated this and the right way to fix it is in the code. What are our next steps to get a coder/someone with coding expertise's eyes on it?"

Or, even better and if it's possible within your org structure, you check with the person who could help first! Then you can tell your boss, "I reached out to Rebecca on our software dev team and she has capacity to help with this by next Tuesday."
posted by capricorn at 12:50 PM on November 13

Response by poster: A close friend at work just suggested that I try, "I've done as much as I can. These remaining tasks need more technical expertise to complete. [Colleague Name], could you take them forward? I have the documentation and can pass it along to you." for when I need to ask a colleague for help directly.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 1:07 PM on November 13 [2 favorites]

I relate very hard to this question, and can't claim perfection. What often helps is a frank discussion of time and priority: "If I take on this task, it will take me at least X days/weeks/months to gain a basic competence to perform this task adequately, and I will need [Y, where Y might be a support from a subject matter expert, some sort of training program or whatever else you'd need to learn]. I currently have [these tasks] on my plate. Should I refocus my priorities on this task and delay the others?"

Agreed that accessibility is definitely important, and I do think that it's worth learning and understanding accessibility requirements as a designer, as design and implementation of accessible interfaces go hand-in-hand. It's often impossible to get a dev to sprinkle accessibility dust on an inaccessible design without changing the design, which is something you are likely responsible for. It's entirely possible that you've made it inaccessible by design inadvertently, if you were wholly responsible for the design of this website. The tools you use may or may not create accessible UI by default, which is another thing your team should work to understand. There are significant technical details to accessible web development that I wouldn't expect a designer to know, and having a frank discussion with your supervisor around division of labor and collaboration with developers on evaluating and fixing accessibility issues is likely warranted.

If your team's approach to accessibility has been to address issues after all the "hard" work of implementation has been done, then you will find a very rough and difficult road ahead of you. It is really something that needs to be accounted for at every stage of the work, right from the initial planning and design phases.
posted by Aleyn at 1:08 PM on November 13 [7 favorites]

The Adventure Begins: A close friend at work just suggested that I try, "I've done as much as I can. These remaining tasks need more technical expertise to complete. [Colleague Name], could you take them forward? I have the documentation and can pass it along to you." for when I need to ask a colleague for help directly.

This sounds fine to me assuming it works within your org structure (in mine, it would be more like "[Colleague Name], is this something you have capacity to help with?"), and since the person who recommended this works with you, I'd be inclined to trust their experience!
posted by capricorn at 1:17 PM on November 13

I think the answer depends on the processes within your business.

You have received a request to complete a task. In order to complete that task there are multiple subtasks. In my role, I would engage the required experts to help complete the subtasks but would still consider myself responsible to deliver the overall result. I wouldn't assign the whole task to others, just the subtasks which require their input.

Sometimes being an expert is not knowing how to do the thing yourself. It's knowing who you need to work with to get the thing done.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 1:49 PM on November 13 [1 favorite]

I have been asked to address accessibility issues on a marketing website. This task requires an understanding of accessibility requirements, code overrides, and the website host (Framer) in general.

Ok so… are you absolutely certain that when you were “asked to address” the issues, that meant “do absolutely every aspect of it yourself with zero input from anyone else”? Because I know that at my job, this would mean “complete the task of learning what will be required and what kind of skilled labor will be required, do the parts you are qualified to do, and then find and project-manage whatever other contributors are needed to complete the project.”
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:07 PM on November 13 [4 favorites]

Here’s a bit that makes me wonder how your company uses the ticket system — both theoretically and in practice—:

asked if he could please address the failed tickets

IME the point of a ticket system is to handle this explicitly, maybe with several steps. EG, in your place I might identify the accessibility tasks to be done by a coder, define them in a new ticket, assign them to a coder (or the dev team or manager who would reassign them); and note in the overall ticket that it can’t be resolved until Newtickets X through Y are resolved. Like a personal todo list, the strength is often in breaking down tasks until each action is doable. Plus knowing who’s working on each action, in a team.
posted by clew at 6:26 PM on November 13

Response by poster: Ok so… are you absolutely certain that when you were “asked to address” the issues, that meant “do absolutely every aspect of it yourself with zero input from anyone else”? Because I know that at my job, this would mean “complete the task of learning what will be required and what kind of skilled labor will be required, do the parts you are qualified to do, and then find and project-manage whatever other contributors are needed to complete the project.”

This is so embarrassing, but no, out of anxiety I just assumed.

The site in question is technically mine in that I designed it and maintain it in Framer, but I am a member of the marketing and research team, not design/development. My company is going through an extensive accessibility audit and this website was overlooked until a few weeks ago, so A11y tickets are coming through just now.

When the tasks were given to me for review, I should have stopped, looked, and really assessed whether these were things I could do. I should have asked if these were things I personally needed to execute on, whether I was actually expected to do each ticket, or if I just needed to give everything a once over and say, "Okay, what do you need from me?" so there could have been a dialogue. I wanted to seem capable. I went about it in the wrong way.

The other thing that has added stress to this situation is that we don't use JIRA and I as a non-member of the design/dev team have 0 insight into how those folks operate workflow-wise. Due to some long-standing office politics I have been discouraged from stepping in and getting down to brass tacks with the dev team to truly understand how things are done. This has left me more out of the loop on process than I have ever been at any company, which I HATE, because usually I am every front end developer's best friend. That combined with general stress about wanting to execute accessibility tasks correctly made me fumble and forget myself and my own standard operating procedures.

I think I am just going to have to be humble but firm about the tasks needing to be completed by another person with more technical expertise and that I will be on hand if they have any questions or want design reviews after changes have been implemented.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 3:28 AM on November 14 [1 favorite]