Doing more with less: How to navigate a smaller IT team

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Header: 59% of professionals spend 11+ hours a week chasing information across systems.†

Copy: This guide breaks down how to connect context across tools and keep work moving.

†Quickbase, 2025

IT teams everywhere face a cascade of challenges, from ransomware attacks, to rogue agents, to building out infrastructure to meet business objectives. For those teams with only a handful of people (and often limited resources), the challenges are that much harder.

How can small IT teams do more with far less than larger companies?

Mark Christie, field CTO in a five-person IT department for StorMagic, told IT Brew that he believes “every business must be experiencing some level of stretch and transition at the moment,” which Christie attributed to rising costs of both hardware and software.

In the summer, a Forrester report found that, while 80% of IT leaders expect their budgets to increase by 10% or more over the next 12 months, emerging technologies like AI demand bigger budgets and more attention to digital transformation and eliminating tech debt.

For small and midsize businesses with smaller IT teams, these transformations require a significant amount of effort. For example, a July 2026 report from IDC cited 77% of midmarket businesses as attempting to prioritize the removal of “semi-manual and manual business processes” to make way for legacy automation. Meanwhile, existing processes are leading to “bottlenecks, errors, and wasted time.”

Using what’s available. Christie said that professionals should make efficient use of the hardware and software resources available to them, utilize the right tools to the best of their capabilities, and ensure there isn’t duplication or crossover.

“[The resources] get reviewed on a fairly regular basis and seeing what adds the most value, and if they add value, then of course they’re necessary,” Christie said.

Communication culture. Christie said that a smaller team should be enabled to tackle immediate tasks and deliver on responsibilities that can impact their teammates and other business groups. This can mean tracking existing service commitments and communicating openly with an eye toward total transparency.

Christie said that his team utilizes Kanban boards for tracking systems, “so it has to be a team effort to use those tools and to be recording these things and…fostering that culture of openness as to where you are with something, how it’s going, what effort you’re putting into it, how hard it is, all of that stuff matters.”

Document everything. Documentation doesn’t stop at logging metrics and tasks. Especially for smaller teams, recording demonstrations for internal learning purposes can be helpful for colleagues who don’t have the time for one-on-one teaching sessions about the tech stack.

Todd Cretacci, a lead DevOps engineer working on a four-person group within a larger IT department at KeyBank, agreed that documenting how to carry out repeatable tasks can help streamline his smaller team’s time and efforts.

“I’ve always been big on documentation, not because it’s an easy way to kill an hour or two, but because it’s important,” Cretacci said. “I fully, thoroughly believe in training juniors to do work and delegating work off to other people, either it be a document or in a documentation system.”

Christie added that videoconferencing platforms are another key way for people to record walkthroughs and presentations, including ones that focus on technology and infrastructure. These recordings can then be stored and kept accessible and available to the team as a whole to be able to review.

“If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist,” Christie said. “Being able to use those tools quickly to be able to produce material that will help somebody and half their time is worth every click of the button that you can do effectively.”

TL;DR. Being a part of smaller IT teams can be stressful and difficult to manage. Christie recommended professionals:

• “Keep a cool head,” which can help employees better deliver on their roles and ensure that they have what they need.
• Understand that “knowledge is king,” and seek to help implement knowledge self-service via documentation.
• Have a transparent and communicative environment so that when one professional’s answer to a question is “I don’t know,” it’s “perfectly acceptable” to call on colleagues who might be able to fill in the gaps where it’s needed.