Here are some things that are not that in software teams:
- managing your own calendar, meetings, memos
- organizing transport and stay on business trips
- tracking and later correctly filling in forms to expense the above
- and yes, tracking supply of office consumables
This and many, many more things have been dumped on everyone by short-sighted beancounting. Salaries of secretaries, graphics departments, finance people, etc. are legible, therefore cutting them is a "big efficiency win". But their work does not disappear - it gets spread out, distributed in tiny pieces to everyone else. Then you have specialists with 10x the salaries of aforementioned departments getting constantly distracted by work that is not the reason they were hired. And people are surprised that productivity doesn't track promised economic improvements, and that everything gets slow to build and expensive for "unknown reasons".
- managing your own calendar, meetings, memos
- organizing transport and stay on business trips
- tracking and later correctly filling in forms to expense the above
- and yes, tracking supply of office consumables
This and many, many more things have been dumped on everyone by short-sighted beancounting. Salaries of secretaries, graphics departments, finance people, etc. are legible, therefore cutting them is a "big efficiency win". But their work does not disappear - it gets spread out, distributed in tiny pieces to everyone else. Then you have specialists with 10x the salaries of aforementioned departments getting constantly distracted by work that is not the reason they were hired. And people are surprised that productivity doesn't track promised economic improvements, and that everything gets slow to build and expensive for "unknown reasons".