I held a speech on the topic at IoTWeek2018 in Helsinki during April. My session, Five ways to fail successfully in IoT, gathered a rather large audience. When I was sharing my personal IoT project experiences, I noticed the approving nods and looks on people’s faces: we all have had these experiences before. I was even delighted to see a gentleman in the front row taking notes. I hope my advice helps him towards successful IoT projects in the future.
1st fail: Overestimating commitment
One of the major pitfalls in IoT projects is not having the right people involved. In my experience, the most successful projects involve not only the right partners, but all relevant functions of the customer organization too. Top management needs to have a strong vision of business goals which to pursue with IoT. This vision needs to be translated to the technical project lead, so that they understand what needs to be done to achieve the business goals. Team effort is one of the most essential factors when starting to think about a new IoT service. Service development, customer support, partner management, procurement, operational management, sales and marketing - they all need to be involved. Still, involvement is just the beginning. To achieve commitment, roles and responsibilities need to be clear and they need to be communicated properly.
Choose your program manager wisely
Do you have a program manager who can coordinate, talk both in technical and business terms, facilitate, delegate, coach and bring all necessary functions of your organization together? If not, I strongly suggest getting external help.
Remaining fails
Other 4 fails that await in the list are:
- Assuming to be the expert
- Overestimating commercial value
- Underestimating costs
- Underestimating time to market
These are all rather vast topics and best be taken as separate blog posts. I will dive into these topics in the upcoming months, but should you want fast answers, you can always get in contact with us right now.
Innofactor offers many services which help our customer organizations to succeed in IoT projects and increasing profitability. With the proven “IoT Journey” methodology, we can help customers in all phases of the project, starting from assessing the skills and abilities of personnel, to sourcing the right devices, to validating business models and helping them define a long-term IoT strategy, including establishing processes and securing a path to production-ready services.
Read more on Innofactor IoT pages
