A little awareness and planning can go a long way towards zeroing in on your weaknesses, and developing a clear plan of action. However, with a confusing array of products and features available on the market, along with the consideration for business requirements, making the final decision is not easy. Here, we list 9 potential mistakes many executives make, that you should definitely avoid
- ROI blind spot: It’s easy for top executives to get lost in the jargon surrounding features, pricing, platform, and dependence. These parameters are important for ROI calculation and need to be judged. However, many businesses fail to factor in the costs required to install, train, analyse and adapt to your new software. These are also important factors to help you determine the sustainability of your suite
- Not treating data as an asset: Your workforce management system is not merely a transactional work-flow. It also contains provisions to channelize workforce activity and control what goes on. Missing where your workforce generates income or increases cost can be detrimental for your business.
- Choosing technology over business needs: The technology you use should focus on your business needs. Opting for the latest technology that doesn’t add much operational value for your business, will only run up your costs.
- Sunk cost misconception: Often, top level executives work too hard to preserve an old investment, to remain cost effective. Many businesses opt for investing in integration of new features with their old systems, instead of investing in new systems that could be developed for much less.
- Overbuying: Executives often wrongly equate a plethora of new features in a software directly to high efficiency and high performances. Choosing features that you may never use will only drive up your costs unnecessarily. It will also confuse your employees, who you will also have to train on each of those features.
- Not consulting field operatives: It is never a good idea to invest in a software for somebody, without first understanding how the software is going to help them. Field operatives are more likely to understand the real-world problems they face, and how to tackle them, better than any management team you have without field experience.
- Failing to communicate: If you fail to communicate about your new software to your team before implementation, your actions will be met with confusion. Unless employees understand the importance of the new software, they will be much less inclined to integrate it with their daily work-flow.
- No future planning: Most businesses invest in a new software, to help with their operations in the present day. However, choosing a solution that is not going to be able to scale with you, as your organization grows is a mistake.
- Not prioritizing user experience: No matter how robust your software’s capabilities are, if it is not tested to have a hassle-free real world user experience, it’s doomed for failure.
This is from "A Guide To End-to-End Field Service Management"
