Why Your IT Team Should Have Its Own Mission Statement

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a mission statement, particularly in terms of your business as a whole. Did you know, however, that you don’t need to stop there? You can—and we’d argue, should—establish more specific organizational missions for your different departments. Let’s consider how you can benefit from creating a mission for your IT team to uphold throughout its operations, and how you might go about doing so.

Let’s review what a mission statement is in a general sense, and then address how to create one more specifically to your business’ IT.

What is a Mission Statement For?

Generally speaking, a mission statement is intended to condense three critical pieces of information into a communicative and accessible format:

1. What your company stands for and strives to accomplish
2. How your company intends to accomplish these goals
3. Who the company wants to serve as they do so

By combining these factors, the mission statement is meant to help give your company direction, not only informing your clients of your priorities, but also giving your employees and partners an idea of what they are contributing towards through their efforts. The mission statement is the idea that you can base your business’ actions around, it’s the rallying cry that is meant to unite your team.

A Team Mission Statement is Effectively a More Specific Version of the Company’s, Applicable to a Certain Department

Rather than looking at the company as a whole to define its mission on a macro scale, a team mission statement looks at a more specific subset of your entire staff and contextualizes your mission statement to more directly describe how that subset can contribute. As a result, any team mission that exists in your company should be in line with your overall company-wide mission statement.

For instance, let’s say that ACME is in the business of producing and distributing widgets. ACME’s mission statement might be something along the lines of, “Improving processes and productivity for individuals by providing them with a widget that solves the problems they face.” ACME’s individual departments could each have their own mission statement that describes how they each contribute to this shared goal.

How to Design a Team Mission Statement for Your IT Team

First, you need to determine what your overall business mission is, so that you can identify what your IT team—and indeed, your IT itself—can do to support it. At that point, it’s a relatively simple matter of putting these intentions into words that help to inspire action and provide a general sense of direction to your team.

What If Your Existing IT Team Can’t Accomplish this Mission on Their Own?

To be fair, it can be challenging for any IT team—particularly one that’s part of a small or medium-sized business—to manage the demands that come with modern technology. First off, many of these teams are simply disproportionately understaffed for the needs that the business presents. Secondly, the goals you have established or even the needs your business has may require certain certifications or experience with specific technologies that your internal team may not hold. That’s where SMART Services can come in.

We offer managed IT services to the businesses of Detroit, serving as an extra resource to help support these businesses’ existing IT teams or working as an entirely outsourced option. Our mission as we do so is to help these businesses accomplish more by ensuring that their IT is an asset, not an obstacle, to their productivity. Give us a call at 586 258-0650 to learn more about how we can help you with our managed IT services.