The Two-Fold Approach to Successfully Managing & Scaling Work

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving marketplace, enterprise success for collaborative work as a platform hinges on managing and scaling work. You can’t scale in a silo, so how do you ensure success??

Managing and scaling work is a technology and process journey, but it’s also an inherently human one. Winning the hearts and minds of your stakeholders is paramount, along with understanding where you stand against your industry peers. Understanding the nuances of your company culture, your tech stack, and your industry is key. In order to be as efficient and effective as possible, there needs to be a two-fold approach – top down and bottom up – so that work can scale seamlessly and challenges can be met at every elevation.

Effectively managing and scaling work requires this two-fold approach because so many people are involved with projects big and small, complex and straight-forward, at different elevations. The approach is imperative –? a top down approach tends to be more aligned with very solution-centric, structured ways of work that are an official part of an Enterprise Project Management Office, tracked to objectives and key results, and sanctioned to be critical to transformation strategy. While well-defined at the top, teams are often left in the dark about the work that needs to be done in their own remit. On the flip side, a bottom up approach tends to align to departmental solutions, where autonomous work thrives and teams feel empowered to drive impact, but work is more easily siloed. This results in a lack of executive visibility, strategic alignment, and a sense of unification.?

Having clarity around your approach is essential for understanding where there are opportunities for improvement. We’ve defined Benchmarking that shows your activity in each of these two different approaches to work execution, and compares your profile against your industry peers to uncover opportunities for improvement. Smartsheet benchmarking helps our customers understand where there are opportunities to better manage work and increase collaboration, in order to optimize overall portfolio management at scale.

Our Benchmarking outlines the complexities from small, team based collaboration to the complexities of large scale solutions through different work categories. A variety of categories are leveraged for benchmarking, like Autonomous Collaboration and Dynamic Operations. Autonomous Collaboration refers to self-directed teams collaborating to solve a business problem. This usually involves users from several functions within the same company and doesn’t involve leadership or executives as active users – more of a bottom up approach. On the flip side, Dynamic Operations are relatively complex solutions that involve workflows and integrations, representing ongoing process change, aligning to the top down approach.?

Clarity around where you stand against industry peers helps identify areas for improvement, set realistic goals, and make informed decisions about how to stay competitive as you mature the balance of “command and control” vs “delegated agility out to the edge.”?

There is often a natural gravitation toward one approach or the other – a centralized, top down solution or decentralized, asynchronous collaboration, but the real unlock is a balance of both, ensuring alignment, visibility, and efficiency at every elevation, in order to achieve business outcomes.?

Smartsheet empowers customers to achieve a balanced approach, like with Directv, who has nearly 200 projects that directly align to their strategic priorities. Managing projects of this size and impact is a complex process, and inherently cross-functional in nature. Smartsheet empowers teams at Directv to manage work at scale, providing a centralized solution and effective ways to track data and KPIs. Visibility is improved top down and bottom up, with streamlined views of project statuses for leadership and executives, allowing them to easily digest data and make decisions, while also allowing teams to see how their work supports strategic priorities.?

Directv is just one example of the importance of managing and scaling work efficiently. As work becomes more complex across industries and the ability to scale becomes more paramount, here are some guiding principles to keep in mind.

1. Prioritize and Align from the Top Down: Start by clearly defining priorities and aligning them to strategic objectives. Identify key projects, initiatives and tasks that contribute directly to achieving your objectives, and prioritize from there. Secure visible support from senior leaders and encourage them to lead by example, demonstrating their commitment through actions, decisions and behaviors.?
2. Empower and Delegate from the Bottom Up: Engage employees at every elevation and encourage decision making, so that employees feel supported in taking the initiative to drive results. Empower employees by delegating authority to foster a sense of ownership, allowing independence and enabling autonomous collaboration.
3. Leverage Insights to Inform Success: Understand which approach is your dominant one – prioritizing and aligning from the top down, or empowering and delegating from the bottom up – to decipher how to balance your strategy. Additionally, leverage benchmarking insights to identify areas of improvement and further adjust your strategy to optimize business outcomes and remain competitive in your industry.?

Managing and scaling work is a journey that never ends. Throughout the journey, it’s important to have honest conversations about which approach is your dominant one and what it would take to achieve a balance. Gaining this clarity internally and around where you stand against your industry peers is essential for enterprise success. Together, we can achieve a balanced approach and continuously drive toward better work management, increased collaboration, and efficiency at scale.