;tldr You are responsible until the work is done and to not loose track of these delegations you use a waiting_for list or tag or whatever else your listmanager is capable of.

You cannot delegate responsibility or at least you shouldn’t try to delegate responsibility fully. What will happen instead is that you hand over the full control over a thing to someone else but you will keep the responsibility, at least a part of it.

A story: Imagine your boss gives you some work to do. But you cannot do it all by yourself. You need some help from a colleague. So, you finish your work and then ask John to do the final 5% or so. After a couple of days, your boss asks whether the task is done. What do you say? “I don’t know, I delegated it to John. Please ask John about it.” What a poor excuse.

Another story: You need to get something done and ask Alice to provide some data. A couple of days later you ask Alice about the data and she replies: “I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have the right permissions. I asked Betty for the permission but I haven’t heard back from her.” How do you feel about that? Do you think “Sure, Alice delegated the task to Betty, so she’s not responsible anymore”? Or is it more like “Fuck, why didn’t Alice ask Betty about the status? She could have at least got back to me and inform me about the delay.” It’s propably more the latter feeling, right?

If you have agreed to do something, you keep the responsibility until it’s DONE or ABANDONED.