How do you scale your team as the company grows?

As a company grows, your centralized BizOps team should not grow at the same pace — i.e. if a $400M company has a 5 person BizOps team, that doesn’t automatically mean that when they double to $800M then BizOps needs a 10 person team.

Your team needs to be able to scale. In order to do this, you need to find ways to offer the same (or more!) value while limiting the increase of the number of BizOps team members. You make the shift from hands-on execution of all of the work to enabling and empowering the business to do some of the work themselves.

At Zendesk, we do this by offering a 3-tiered service model: Delivery, Advisory, and Self-Service.

Delivery

This is the typical BizOps support that I have been describing in previous posts. As requests come in from your customers around the company, the BizOps team identifies the appropriate solution and works with the business to design it and turn it into a reality. In Delivery, the work is still a partnership with the business, but BizOps team members are hands-on and creating outputs.

Having a consistent methodology will help you scale your Delivery and execute more effectively. However, Delivery will always require a minimum amount of resources from the BizOps team.

Advisory

Advisory-tier support is more consultative in nature. It’s shorter term and lighter-touch than Delivery. The BizOps customer does the hands-on work, with coaching from a BizOps team member. Advisory typically involves things like brainstorming sessions, peer reviews, or sharing examples of work.

Common examples:

• A new project is about to begin and the team needs inspiration and guidance on the best way to move it forward.
• A project is underway and has run into some obstacles. They’re stuck and need to introduce some new thinking to solve their problems.
• A project is concluding and the team is presenting their outcomes to the C-suite. They’d like feedback on their presentation to ensure it tells a compelling and concise story.

To do Advisory successfully, BizOps team members need to be prepared to act as thought partners — a slightly different skillset from Delivery. It’s not enough to know how to solve problems and design solutions yourself — you need to coach others to unlock their own ideas and creative thinking.

The Powerful Questions skills training that I described in my team development post is an example of how we grow this skillset.

Self-Service

“Do it yourself” might not sound like an appealing tagline, but there are many times where BizOps customers just need a quick resource to get them moving.

Self-service accelerators can range from quick tips and best practices to lengthier, more detailed content. They can be basic 101 intros or more advanced. I recommend offering a range of options initially, and then once you see which are most frequently used, you can create more.

Examples we’ve created:

• One-pager on best practices for presentations
• 8-page playbook on how to build a process
• Toolkit for 360 feedback

It can also be helpful to offer occasional live webinars or lunch-and-learns to introduce the self-service products you’ve created. It provides a warm intro to the content and offers the opportunity for question-and-answer.

Adding Advisory and Self-Service to your support model doesn’t just help scale the BizOps team. It also helps to mature and scale the entire company. Self-service in particular makes it easy for anyone at the company to easily improve their skills and evolve their work product, with no additional demands on the BizOps team.

The biggest key to success here is to make all 3 tiers of support feel effective and impactful. You’ll know you’re doing it right when a customer says to you, “I don’t need to take up your time — if you can just share a playbook with me, I’ll be all set.”