What Are the 4 Most Common Challenges for a Scaling IT Services Organization?

Whether your IT services organization is an internal department working to support a larger business or a standalone company, growth is a consistent goal and a measure of success. But with growth there will inevitably be complications and challenges unique to your business.

Understanding what these potential scaling challenges are, and how to overcome them, will help a growing IT business maintain success and scale in predictable, positive ways.

Common IT Scaling Challenges

A growing number of clients, projects, and resources can create a wide variety of scaling challenges, including:

1. Changing Management Structure – While it may have been your management philosophy and structure that drove success and the opportunity to scale, adapting to a larger, more complex structure is inevitable. Internal IT departments may have a single manager and IT businesses may have managers who are alo individual contributors, but this structure doesn’t scale. As your organization grows, review roles and responsibilities often,consider workloads and the need for additional management resources.
2. Building Departments – As IT organizations grow the complexities of work increase and may require a broader, multi-functional team made up of several groups or departments. This transition requires changes in leadership, new business processes, shifting responsibilities for existing team members, and hiring new resources to fill roles and build new departments. This can be a challenging time, but successful execution means new possibilities.
3. Refining Business Processes – The old ways of completing projects and tasks may not work in a larger organization. As your IT services business scales, so should your processes. From ticketing through completion, your projects will naturally become larger and involve more resources as the organization scales, which means that more detailed control will become necessary for success.
4. Removing Unnecessary Teams – Scaling does not only mean the addition of resources, it can mean the removal or reorganization of preexisting teams and individual resources. Some roles may become obsolete and some skills may no longer be needed as a byproduct of becoming a larger and more complex organization. Each IT organization will handle redundancy in a different manner, but removing unnecessary roles will strengthen margins.

Solving Your Scaling Problems

Scaling an IT organization successfully takes planning, well-defined roles with assigned responsibilities, and new technology that can support business processes and evolving organizational structure. Having an approach that ensures your people, processes, and technology efficiently scale alongside your business, projects, and clients will help prevent the 4 most common challenges from slowing down your growth.

Project and resource management software can highlight which team members are overworked, reveal what may be holding your projects back, and provide Gantt charts that help plot out your new approach to tasks. Building on software that scales with your business provides the support that you need when venturing into new, more challenging, but ultimately rewarding, ways of doing business as an IT services organization.

Prepare for the Future of Work

The Kantata Professional Services Cloud is designed to enable today’s business to refine and accelerate to succeed in a changing world. Find out what Kantata can do for you today.