Do you have a process in place to effectively scale when new challenges and demands are thrown your way? When your IT staff is working overtime unexpectedly, it’s a sign that your business is growing.

Success means an increase in numbers, however this can become overwhelming when you see big growth statistics in a short period of time. Like the old saying goes, it’s important to be able to see the forest from the trees, especially in times of change. Don’t let the tree metaphor trick you into thinking this only applies to those working in agriculture! If you’re in finance, real estate, or any service industry, you’ve got to be able to energize your perspective to think about that treeline in the forest. Don’t spend your team’s precious time looking backward to keep doing it the way it’s always been done. Invest in thinking future forward.

Technology and digital is the backbone for most competitive industries, however IT is not your core business. How can you best leverage your limited, highly skilled internal team to think of new ways to innovate and automate your business? What partner can you trust to keep the lights running and make sure all workstations are performing well? While time management is essential, keeping on top of timelines and deadlines can be a struggle.

• Plan ahead to handle acquisitions: Scalability is about reducing the time it takes to accomplish your important tasks as workloads expand. A scalable system should maintain or increase performance and efficiency against your business’ operational demands. When you’re growing, expect bigger contracts that result in bigger growing pains. Don’t put off the planning process until it happens. As Business Thinker writes, “You can easily get so caught up in the acquisition process itself that you delay proper planning of the takeover until after closing takes place. This would be a big mistake. Successfully executed acquisitions require months of planning.”

• Position yourself with a trustworthy IT partner so that you can lean on them to take care of your basic IT needs. As you build a relationship with your IT partner, you need to get in sync on the process with trust and respect, accountability and transparency.

• Intentionally foster employee productivity: Overtime doesn’t always equal productivity. Your IT team is tired of working overtime. In fact, they’re working overtime and still not working quick enough. The right IT partner can cut your IT deployment time down from 2-3 weeks to 2-3 days. Saving the time means your energy can be spent on strategy and bigger business goals. When your team is bogged down with user ready IT demands, they don’t have the capacity to innovate. Their time, and your money, isn’t well spent missing opportunities to build smart, sustainable solutions.

• Don’t fixate on a single tree: As a leader, you have the power and responsibility to advance your business strategy.? Understanding macromanagement, and not being a micromanager, is the key to being a successful and respected leader. Harvard Business Review describes another way to think about it, in an article titled, “How leaders can focus on the big picture.” They write, “Time and effort spent on macromanagement enables leaders to be as clear, decisive and disciplined at the macro level — on the big strategic questions the organization is facing — as their managers are at the micro level, i.e., about how these decisions might be implemented.”
  
  Effective leaders also connect the dots. As Forbes writes, “They have a strategy that serves as the foundation for how the problem will be approached and managed. They anticipate the unexpected and utilize the strengths of their people to assure the strategy leads to a sustainable solution.”