How to Maximize Value from Your Technology Investments

Are you tired of putting months into researching technology solutions and then waiting even longer after complicated implementations to start seeing your return on investment?

As technology and innovation accelerate, most companies maintain outdated methods for evaluating and implementing technology. The software as a service model (SaaS) provides an opportunity to shorten the time it takes to realize investment benefits. Still, most companies haven’t evolved their selection processes to take advantage of these changes. 

Modern software is shrinking the decision-making time and, most importantly, the “time to value.” Time to value is the period from software purchase to your company seeing results from that investment. Optimizing time to value provides a unique opportunity for your company to accelerate return on investment and understand the appetite for innovation inside your company’s walls. 

Easier Software Selection

Does the following sound painfully familiar?

You gather your critical stakeholders in the room, discuss the company’s challenges, and identify a workflow that is not meeting your expectations. A small team breaks off in search of potential tools available to address your company’s needs. Days, weeks, and even months go by while underperforming workflows languish. At the same time, your evaluators focus on searching for an ideal solution and ultimately taking time away from other pressing business needs. 

To dramatically accelerate your journey towards innovation, it’s important to first focus on the expectations that will drive your selection process. Mapping out selection requirements is an integral part of selecting new software. The selection process gets bogged down on the internal minutiae for every aspect of the process. Instead, change the focus to a results-based approach to selecting software.

SaaS software provides a unique outcome-driven focus since the mechanics are occurring outside of your infrastructure and thus can transform many of the interim steps older software solutions require. Focusing your teams on the problem and the success criteria can reduce the weeks and months of searching to days! 

Software selection is a process you will learn to improve continuously by understanding that there will be steps you can remove each time you do it. This doesn’t change your focus on results but eliminates the noise and allows you to better communicate with software vendors around your specific problems and success criteria.

Focus is the key to saving time and keeping your teams and potential vendors on track to delivering the best solution for your needs.

Now that we have reinvented the selection process, it’s on to the struggle of implementation.

Minimize Implementation Pain

Do you really need months of training, hours of diverting essential resources to relearn new processes, and even face the possibility of creating new roles inside your business?

There’s a better way.

If your team selects a SaaS solution, you will avoid complex infrastructure needs, eliminate long implementation cycles, and inherently gain wins around time to value. Modern SaaS vendors have realized that complicated setup processes and software administration can drain enthusiasm created in the initial selection process.

Deploying the first team on the project should be about using the software and experiencing the solution benefits identified during the selection process. Participating in the process improvements and focusing on the results will provide you with a faster time to value and create a natural set of internal champions.

Eventually, the administration and setup will be handed over to your internal teams but not before you are reaping the rewards and building your innovation culture. If you follow the suggestions above and select the right tools to solve your problems, implementing the right SaaS solution will get things done in weeks rather than months or years.

The construction industry is uniquely poised to support this approach to software selection since we are primarily project-driven. This model provides a focused methodology to deploy new solutions and get iterative feedback while larger organizational rollouts are still in the planning phase.

Iterating and understanding the adjustments made during the initial project rollouts will be crucial in continuing a frictionless process of further deploying the solution across your company. 

People inside your organization will naturally gravitate towards understanding how the software functions and how to best administer it, just like a future mechanic starts to wonder how engines work. Both the software and construction companies need to be aware of and look out for these modern software mechanics to take their place. 

Key to customer success

The convergence of the necessity to innovate, SaaS software, and new approaches to time to value drives the evolution of technology in the built world.

Gone are the days of waiting months and years to experience project team improvements. Instead, your job is to identify problems and use new criteria to select partners dedicated to innovative delivery methods.

At Join, we are invested in our customers’ success and are relentlessly focused on shortening the time to value of our platform. The most important metric of any software company is understanding their customer’s success and experience.