Seconding Developers into Operational Roles

Over the years, I’ve worked for several organisations with large call centres, where it was standard practice to rotate IT staff through regular secondments in call centre teams. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed this experience and seen high-value outcomes from those interactions.

It has occurred to me several times that we should apply this as standard practice, particularly for software engineers. In the past, the main resistance I’ve encountered is that developers tend to be more expensive than call centre staff, so assigning them to operational teams for a period can seem like an unnecessary expense.

However, this argument fails to recognise the financial benefit of having a developer (who is capable of automating most things) perform highly repetitive and often manual administrative tasks for a significant period. I’ve often joked that the quickest way to automate a task is to give it to a developer, because they hate repetition. The very core of a developer’s job is to remove repetition from others’ lives – but it becomes even more important when developers are removing repetition from their own lives.

There is also a depth of understanding that can only be achieved by performing a task ourselves – far superior to the understanding we gain by asking someone else about the repetitive tasks they perform in their job. This hands-on experience equips developers to build more effective and nuanced solutions.

Over the past couple of decades, I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a specialised role within IT that temporarily takes over operational roles, with the goal of automating and streamlining those roles until they are effectively redundant. I’ve never come up with a great title for this role, but consider the potential impact: if one person were seconded into four roles per year and made significant progress toward streamlining those roles, the upside would be enormous – far outweighing the cost differential between an administrator and a developer.

This idea resurfaced for me recently during a conversation with the CEO of a smaller charity. We were discussing creative ways of identifying and resolving bottlenecks without the need to engage an expensive business analyst or consultant. After that chat, I realised that the advent of AI-powered development tools is a game-changer in this context.

AI is already reducing the cost of building solutions, effectively lowering the per-hour cost of developers. At the same time, it is lowering the barrier to entry for young developers entering the market – a trend I’ve observed firsthand. If you combine these two trends, it might not be long before we can routinely place junior and mid-level developers into operational roles at a much lower cost. This could dramatically increase the availability of automation solutions, especially for smaller organisations.

By embedding developers into operational teams, we not only resolve immediate bottlenecks but also create opportunities to innovate, streamline, and automate processes in ways that deliver long-term strategic value. For organisations, especially charities and small businesses with tight budgets, this approach could represent a transformational shift.

Which specific operational tasks or bottlenecks would you assign to a seconded developer, and why? Reply with your thoughts!

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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