A regional charity appoints a coordinator after several projects compete for the same volunteers. The coordinator introduces a shared schedule, a weekly review, and a short report for the leadership team. Initially, the arrangement helps. Project leads can see clashes earlier and avoid promising people who are already committed elsewhere.
Six months later, the shared schedule is still useful, but the reporting has expanded. Leads maintain separate summaries for the coordinator, a funding review, and the leadership meeting. The weekly discussion includes information already available in those records. A second meeting prepares the first. People reasonably ask whether the arrangement now creates more work than it removes.
That question deserves investigation. The number of meetings cannot establish whether a manager is useful, and an expanding process does not prove that someone is protecting their position. Equally, an activity can continue long after its original purpose has weakened. Evaluating management means looking at the work it enables, the obligations it fulfils, and the costs it introduces.
Start With the Service the Arrangement Provides
The charity’s coordinator has several possible contributions. They might resolve competing claims on volunteers, identify an emerging shortage, help project leads plan, or provide evidence needed by a funder. These contributions need different kinds of information and authority. Combining them under a broad promise to improve coordination makes it difficult to judge the arrangement later.
Choose a recent case and reconstruct what changed because the coordinator was involved. Did they find an available volunteer, secure a decision about priorities, or prevent a project from making an unsupported commitment? Could the project leads have reached the same result through an existing mechanism? What other work did the intervention displace?
Include ordinary cases as well as dramatic recoveries. A role can be valuable because it makes work more predictable and reduces the need for rescue. Conversely, visible crisis handling may reflect a problem the arrangement could have helped prevent. Neither conclusion follows from the coordinator being busy.
Some contributions will be difficult to count. Coaching a new project lead can improve judgement over time. Maintaining a trusted contact with a partner can make an unusual request easier to resolve. Ask for credible examples and feedback rather than insisting that every useful conversation produce an immediate measurable saving. The unseen work managers do needs consideration alongside the work visible in the calendar.
Trace the Requirements That Generate Activity
For each recurring report or meeting, establish who uses it and for what purpose. The leadership team may need an overview of committed resources. A funder may require evidence about a particular programme. Project leads may need advance warning of a shortage. These are legitimate but distinct needs.
The problem could be duplication rather than unnecessary information. If three reports use the same staffing figures, a common source may reduce preparation while retaining different views for different audiences. If the definitions differ, however, automating the transfer could spread misleading information faster. Establish what each number means before consolidating the records.
Ask whether the recipient still uses the output. A report introduced during a difficult expansion may have no active reader after the work stabilises. Its continued existence might reflect an overlooked requirement, an unclear owner, or caution about stopping something previously requested. None requires a theory about the manager’s motives to justify review.
Reporting also supports assurance, accountability, and awareness. It need not trigger a fresh decision every week to be useful. The relevant test is whether its purpose remains valid and whether the detail, frequency, and preparation cost are proportionate. A quarterly assurance record can be sensible even when a weekly presentation of the same material adds little.
Count the Burden Across the Whole Arrangement
A thirty-minute meeting occupies more than the coordinator’s time. Several project leads attend, prepare information, and follow up afterwards. A useful assessment includes those contributions, while distinguishing active effort from time spent waiting for a response. Waiting can delay a project even when it does not consume someone’s entire working day.
Use a bounded sample rather than creating a permanent recording system to investigate overhead. For a few weeks, note the preparation needed for recurring outputs, where information is entered more than once, and which decisions await a particular forum. Ask participants what they could stop doing if a requirement changed.
Compare those costs with relevant outcomes: fewer scheduling conflicts, reliable coverage, timely funding evidence, or quicker resolution of disputed priorities. An increase in coordination effort may be justified during an expansion or a period of high risk. An unchanged meeting load after the original problem has disappeared warrants a different discussion.
Google’s SRE book makes a useful distinction in its chapter on eliminating toil. It defines a particular kind of repetitive operational work and explicitly distinguishes it from administrative overhead. That distinction matters here: calling every disliked management activity toil obscures its purpose. The practical question is which repeated work can be reduced without losing something necessary.
Simplify One Requirement and Observe the Consequences
The charity could replace its weekly presentation with a maintained schedule and a short discussion only of unresolved conflicts. Before doing so, identify any information the presentation provides that the schedule does not. A partner commitment or safeguarding concern may need a separate, appropriately restricted route.
State what is changing, who will maintain the remaining record, and how people can raise an urgent issue. Otherwise removing the meeting can simply move the same work into private messages. A reduction in formal activity is a poor result if project leads now have to contact several people to obtain an answer that was previously available in one place.
Try the revised arrangement through a normal operating period and a demanding case. Check whether conflicts are still detected, whether project leads can get decisions, and whether leadership receives the evidence it needs. Ask about extra work that has appeared elsewhere. People absorbing that work may not be the people who designed the simplification.
Some requirements need amendment by someone other than the coordinator. A funder, board, or internal policy owner may have established them. Identify the actual obligation before removing it, and seek a less burdensome way of meeting it where possible. Claims that a particular format is required should be checked against the requirement itself.
This is also a test of authority. If the coordinator must chair a meeting but cannot settle the conflicts discussed there, changing the agenda may have limited effect. The organisation may need to establish a decision route, as the article on managers without authority explores.
One risk in the review is crediting the new arrangement with every favourable result. The charity may have fewer scheduling conflicts because demand fell, a difficult project ended, or a new volunteer group joined. Ask what else changed and whether the proposed explanation fits the cases. A precise causal estimate may be impractical, but a plausible account should acknowledge these alternatives.
The reverse problem occurs when preventive work disappears from view. If the coordinator regularly notices clashes before project leads make commitments, the absence of visible disputes is not evidence that allocation work is unnecessary. Examine how those clashes are detected and whether the same function can be performed more simply. The question concerns the mechanism, not the need to create a crisis to demonstrate value.
Finally, consider who experiences the benefit and who carries the burden. A convenient leadership summary may require disproportionate effort from a small project team. That imbalance does not settle the decision, but it should be visible when the format and frequency are agreed. Asking only senior recipients whether a report is useful leaves much of its cost unexamined.
Evaluate the Role Separately From Its Current Process
Finding unnecessary reporting does not establish that the whole role is unnecessary. The coordinator may still provide planning, support, and a point of contact that projects would otherwise have to arrange. Equally, preserving a useful schedule does not justify every responsibility attached to the position.
Separate the contribution from the current method. Volunteer allocation might be handled through clearer project boundaries, a rotating duty, or a dedicated coordinator with a narrower remit. Each option has costs and limitations. A rotating arrangement requires training and continuity; a dedicated role requires enough useful work and suitable authority to justify its capacity.
The people in the role should participate in this assessment. They may know which requests generate little value but have lacked permission to challenge them. They also need a fair opportunity to explain work that others do not see. Organisational design and individual performance are related questions, but they should not be collapsed into an accusation about personal worth.
Rewarding simplification helps make the review credible. If a coordinator removes a duplicate reporting requirement, that can be an improvement even though their activity becomes less visible. Assess the resulting reliability, usefulness, and workload. Otherwise the organisation can inadvertently encourage the very expansion it complains about.
The charity’s objective is a workable allocation of volunteers and a reliable account of its commitments. Management supports that objective when it helps people make and maintain those arrangements at a reasonable cost. Keeping that purpose visible allows unnecessary work to be challenged without overlooking the responsibilities that remain.
