Context switching is hard especially when understaffed and most certainly when doing different types of work. I’m still “executing” engineering projects, but I’m also performing inside sales functions, helping advance and maintain our dev systems, and now manage 2 functional groups. Unfortunately stuff does fall by the way side all the time.
Prioritizing things is key, but at the end of the day there is a capacity to what one can do. It takes good management skills to realize the capacity of the employees and when things need to change. Luckily for me I’m working with groups in all three of the areas I was working in to offload those extra responsibilities to other people so I can focus on what I’m supposed to be doing (managing).
It would be interesting to see how they operate.