For construction, the term “technology road map” is relatively new to most contractors. However, in recent months, the urgency to create these road maps has risen dramatically.
This process can be difficult, time consuming and extremely frustrating if your company doesn’t include all the information needed to plan technology integration correctly. To prevent this from happening to you, we’ll discuss why technology road maps are important for your business goals, what they’re used for, and what to include when creating yours.
Why Technology Road Maps Are Essential To Your Business Goals
Technology connects us. It does things we can’t. Probably faster and with much less error but it shouldn’t burden you. It should empower you. It’s nothing more than a tool to become the best version of your working self. Digital transformation is the future for Construction.
Construction companies around the world have adopted this philosophy and the numbers back it up.
In a recent 2020 Procore survey, it found that two-thirds of the construction companies surveyed had rolled out some sort of technology during the covid lock down. A whooping 94% witnessed improvements in the way their teams work as a result. Conventional methods simply don’t cut it the way they used to. There’s too little margin for error to make up the inefficiencies in outdated tools or processes. This is why technology road maps are essential to accomplishing your business goals.
When you document your technology strategy for your company, you’ll see the positive impacts ripple down to each employee whether they’re aware of it or not… It’s an amazing tool to drive cross-functional collaboration and to increase transparency between your decision makers. Having this document readily available enables every manager to stress the importance of new tools or to follow new procedures.
When your teammates know exactly why they’re doing something AND they understand the benefits of the outcome, you’ll start to see amazing engagement and progression with your technology implementation.
Get the most value from your time and capital investments!
In order to save time and money with your software, leverage technology road maps when you run into implementation hurdles. It ties every piece of technology together and it aligns everyone into accomplishing one universal goal. Success for the company!
Without these strategic plans to fall back on, your leaders will continue encountering the silo mentality when implementing new software tools.
(For more information about the silo mentality, click here)
What are technology road maps used for?
Technology road maps are used to document short and long term goals for your technology investments. In this case, we’re using software as our technology reference.
Your technology road map should be the “go-to” document for all critical information regarding your software. Refer to this road map often to make the best decisions in regards to your technology implementation. Technology road maps go hand it hand with IT Systems road maps. But for the majority of most contractors, these documents hardly exist or the road map is extremely disconnected with the business.
Not all road maps are created the same. They are created specifically to address certain needs and are followed to execute certain goals. In the use case for Construction companies, we’ll say your “technology road map” should contain the following at a minimum:
- Technology Goals
- Existing Software Capabilities
- Release Plans For Future Tech Integration
- Milestones / OKR’s/ KPI’s
- Resource Planning / Costs
- Training
- Risk
Here are 5 simple elements that are essential to creating dynamic technology road maps for your business:
1.) Map Your Current Technology Landscape
Before your team can create technology goals for your road map to lead to, every decision maker needs in-depth understanding of how the business operates. Remove the blinders and give your leadership team some holistic perspective. This drives better decision making.
Transparency is key to optimizing your technology strategy and removing the waste from your process. To provide transparency, each department lead will need to list the current software tools their team uses to facilitate each process. For each software:
- Write a brief description of the purpose and how effective it’s been over the past year. Include a bullet list of the pros and cons.
- Include the monetary investment as well as how much people use this tool to do their jobs. (Monetary investment/per year)
- Define the risks associated with keeping your existing tools and processes vs. finding new methods or solutions.
- When newer technologies are proposed, provide the required monetary investment along with a timeline for implementation and when you expect to see an improvement in results.
Every team leader needs to understand where the breakdowns are happening, how they contribute and how much it’s costing the business as a whole. This is a very important step to creating your technology road map. By doing this, you can address the pitfalls ASAP and can ultimately turn weakness into strength.
Connect Your Data Work Flows
Once all of your teams products are documented with the information listed above, organize your software documents in chronological order based on your workflow for project execution.
(Ie. Sales → Project Management → Fabrication → Field)
- Connect each adjacent tool with a linear line. This represents your companies data flow from start to finish.
It’s important because the visual enables everyone to see where data management breakdowns occur in the business. A “data management breakdown” can represent a number of different issues but in this context, we’ll say data management breakdowns are when you have to reproduce data that already exists.
2.) Set Clear Goals/Expectations
Another important step that’s often not clear to most, what are your expectations for your technology investments? If you have technology goals, are they being tracked? No one can know if something is beneficial if goals aren’t tracked against actual results. OKR’s & KPI’s are required to gauge what direction your workforce is moving. You’ll quickly see if your software implementation is stagnant and not progressing as planned.
To create expectations that are understood and can be met, include the following when determining your goals:
- Create short term performance goals that are clearly definable and can be validated with actual numbers. (Ie. Decrease MH/per project by 25%)
- Include long term goals to strive for. These should be motivating, exciting and should push the limits of your companies safe zone. (Ie. Fully digitizing data workflow, data analytics, automation etc)
- List the person directly responsible for implementing the software. Accountability will ensure there’s consistent effort in meeting expectations.
- Document milestones and include dates to share progress with your teams
3.) Strategic Leadership (Process & Communication)
After your management team has mapped their software landscape and has included clear goals and expectations to execute the road map, the next step is to get your execution team up to speed.
This is where so many companies fail to execute.
Rigid processes with clearly defined responsibilities for each department needs to be documented and accessible to everyone. Managers need to ensure their team has enough information to fully understand the technology road map, the end goal and how they are to contribute to that goal.
Unfortunately, having this information on paper is only half the battle. The hardest part of this process is actually getting your team to follow the plan.
Before moving forward with implementing a new product or process, discuss with your team what the improvements are for the entire company. Pull up your handy road map and visually show them how the technology can open bottlenecks and enable better data flow. You want to mention that it improves every teams performance and will save everyone’s time, not just one team. “One mission, one goal” should be the premise of your tech strategy. Remember to re-enforce this message continuously as your team progresses with implementing new tech.
Without strategic leadership and enforcement, buy-in will drop off which eventually slows your progress and lengthens your tech adoption curve.
4.) Resource Planning
Having a rock solid technology road map and implementation strategy helps, but in order to execute, you need to invest meaningful resources to maintain the initiatives momentum. Nothing is more deflating to company moral than starting an exciting, innovative movement, then not providing the necessary resources and leadership to make it happen.
Construction companies are slowly devoting more resources to executing technology road maps then ever before. Don’t cut corners. These resources add tremendous value and progress to your goals.
Teams are being restructured and so are day to day responsibilities. Multifaceted employees should have opportunities to fill hybrid roles that facilitate cross collaboration, innovation and process improvement across the business. This is an extremely positive trend for the industry and this should continue well into the future.
5.) Progress Reporting/KPI’s
Two-way communication is so important for a road maps to be successful. Maintain steady communication to see how things are actually going with the new processes and technology implementation. Use check-in meetings so your team can provide feedback to address any obstacles. Try and close the communication loop with your teams at least (3) times per quarter. This creates enough 2-way dialog to keep everyone in sync.
Technology road maps shouldn’t be rigid. Use your team’s feedback to refine your product roadmap.
Plans change, people make mistakes and there will be misconceptions. Your road map should be fluid and adjusted periodically throughout the year. This is why its important to be given feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.
Having a fluid technology road map doesn’t mean you can’t implement rigid processes. Processes have to be rigid or no one will follow them consistently. Plus its pretty tough to keep consistent buy-in when day-to-day processes are constantly changing.
Conclusion
Technology road maps can produce amazing results for your business. But in order to do that, you need to align your team and increase the transparency on how each team operates. Your technology road map will give you the foundation to fall back on when things aren’t going as planned. Document your breakdowns and make your team aware of them.
This will keep your team engaged, your software useful and will lead to the smoothest path to your technology success!
Need help creating a technology road map? No problem! We can help. Contact us for free consultation and to discuss your technology goals for the future.
(Looking to implement new software? Wait! Create a custom one to ensure it meets your needs. Visit us at www.foresytesolutions.com for more info)
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