What Do Companies Need to Improve Agility?

by Stephen Danos
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The need for businesses to adopt technology and software platforms has evolved at an accelerated pace. For companies and IT teams striving to become more agile, the technology they adopt needs to enable faster decision making while ensuring the administrative controls and data security vital to scaling software platforms across their entire organization.

In a recent report, McKinsey found that agile organizations have a “70 percent chance of being in the top quartile of organizational health,” which is attributed to their ability to achieve customer centricity, quicker time to market for developing products, increased revenue growth, reduced costs, and better employee engagement.

The report also identified characteristics that successful agile organizations have in common, including a willingness to embrace next-generation enabling technology.
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Embrace the New Technology Mindset

According to the report, companies can improve their chances at becoming more agile if they transform their mindset from “technology as supporting capability” determined by “priorities, resourcing, and budget” to one that approaches technologies as holistic solutions.

These businesses take technology, such as work execution platforms, and make sure they are “seamlessly integrated and core to every aspect of the organization,” in order to empower teams to react quickly to the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and the business.

Many agile companies are looking for cloud-based, adaptable software tools that help stabilize repeatable work processes, enabling employees to be more dynamic and innovative in solving their organization’s business challenges.

The Smartsheet work execution platform enables teams to design tools that support process and project management practices with little formal technology support. Teams, departments, and organizations can rapidly build project and process workflows to meet the evolving needs of customers. Choosing the right work execution platform often starts with IT departments adopting enterprise-ready tools that they can trust and deploy with confidence.
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Secure Platforms That Meet Compliance Standards

As more organizations use a work execution platform to enable real-time collaboration and consistency, agile IT departments have to be confident that their solutions are secure and compliant with government regulations for data security.

A work execution platform should have privacy controls and governance to meet an IT department’s architecture roadmap. In addition, they need to adopt a platform that they trust with handling data.
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Smartsheet is FedRAMP Ready and used by 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies, meeting or exceeding the rigorous security and compliance standards of IT leaders. Also, all payment card transactions are processed using merchants services that are compliant with PCI DSS. Teams can build strategic initiatives using Smartsheet as a secure collaboration hub, regardless of the scope of work.

Once an organization is up and running on Smartsheet, its departments can gain improved visibility into the information and data they need to effectively collaborate on recurring processes and projects of all sizes.

The ability for employees to securely maneuver between these work streams—through Smartsheet dashboards, grids, reports, workspaces, and more—helps drive organizational alignment and agility.
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Administrator Controls That Scale

A key component for agile transformation is using technology tools that fit with IT architecture, systems, and development and delivery practices. Smartsheet mobilizes end-to-end ownership, whether teams are multi-disciplinary in nature or rely on multiple stakeholders to collaborate throughout repeatable processes.

In agile companies, cross-functional teams regularly communicate and work together to build, test, and deploy new products and processes. System administrators need powerful controls that scale, such as those for configuration, permissions, user access and authentication, and global security controls.
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Smartsheet Dynamic View and Smartsheet Control Center, two premium applications, give system admins even more control over who has access to information and data, based on permission levels, and when they can access it.

Learn More About Smartsheet

As more organizations strive to be more agile, embracing scalable software platforms and tools that are secure and easy to deploy gives them at a competitive advantage. To learn more about Smartsheet’s dedication to security, privacy, compliance, and visibility and control, visit the Smartsheet Trust Center.
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Source: Smartsheet Blog
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