Field note / internal IT hire
Your IT hire is a role. A delivery lane is a queue. They are not competing for the same work.
The most common mistake here is not choosing wrong - it is never actually deciding which requests belong where, and letting your one IT hire become an informal dispatcher for both.
Usually stays with the hire
Firm-specific judgment and relationships.
Vendor relationships they already own, firm-specific tooling knowledge, anything requiring on-the-ground presence, and the decisions that need someone who already knows your context without a handoff.
Resolve first
- What only they can do because of relationships or history
- Which vendor accounts and licences are in their name
- What happens to that knowledge if they are out for a week
Candidate for a qualified lane
Repeatable, documented, recurring work.
The routine pattern that repeats often enough to standardize, Microsoft 365 administration inside agreed roles, and endpoint work where tooling already aligns.
Resolve first
- Whether the pattern is documented enough to hand off
- Who authorizes the lane to act without checking with the hire first
- How the hire is kept informed so they are not surprised by client feedback
Two failure modes
Where this arrangement usually breaks.
- The internal hire becomes an unpaid translator, relaying every request to the lane instead of either owning or delegating it cleanly.
- Delivery and the internal hire give contradictory instructions because neither has visibility into what the other already did.
- Recurring work quietly stays with the hire out of habit, and the lane never actually gets tested.
- The hire is not told about the arrangement early enough to trust it.
Every one of these is a design failure, not a people failure - and every one is avoidable with an explicit boundary.
Make the split explicit
Three decisions, named out loud.
| Decision | Internal hire | Delivery lane |
|---|---|---|
| Who receives the first request? | Whichever channel the client or staff already trust. | The channel agreed for the qualified pattern only. |
| Who approves scope or price changes? | Usually stays with the hire, or their manager. | Raises the question; does not decide it. |
| Who is told when the other side acts? | Sees a record of lane activity relevant to their systems. | Sees a record of anything the hire changes in the shared environment. |
Related decision
This is a specific case of a general ownership question.
The same responsibility split that governs any partner relationship applies here - just with one named person instead of an anonymous client-facing team.
Bring what your hire already spends the most time on.
That single answer is usually enough to test whether a bounded lane would actually help, or just add a third voice to the queue.