Guide for specialist contractors: software implementation and implementation of driving solutions

Identify pain points and sell the vision

Once you’ve decided it’s the right time to start the technology purchasing process, the first step is to break down the “pain you’re feeling” in your organization into a list of more tangible, specific problems.

Discussing these pain points will help you develop an effective criteria list for the technology you want to bring on board. It will also help you start selling this vision by explaining how the technology solution will solve these problems.

Quantifying these pain points is extremely important. We’ve seen time and time again that this helps teams move away from ambiguous statements like “this will make us perform better.” Instead, create a more compelling vision by clearly stating the expected value (e.g., “This will save our foremen 3 hours a week because they won’t have to do XYZ tasks that they find very frustrating”).

The clearer the vision, the greater the likelihood of successful implementation.

At this stage, you should always keep in mind the actual users of the technology platform, not just the decision-makers. You’ll certainly need buy-in from your management and IT team, but most importantly, you need to consider the people who will be using the technology on a daily basis: colleagues in your office, warehouse, and field teams. What are their pains, motivations and fears? You need to have a plan to solve each of them individually.

To ensure buy-in across your organization, use Kojo’s playbook to address pain points and sell the vision to every stakeholder.

Initial implementation

Once you’ve developed a list of pain points and have buy-in from your entire team, it’s time to start implementing.

Kojo’s Q4 2023 customer survey responses show that while implementation timelines vary based on software type and complexity, vendors typically promise that implementation and onboarding training will take 1 to 3 months.

In fact, it turns out that most implementations take less time double This. Beware of suppliers who promise overly optimistic deadlines but do not deliver:

Risk management

To ensure successful adoption of a technology solution, it is important to select a vendor with a proven track record of strong customer retention and successful implementation. In fact, a vendor’s ability to provide high-quality, ongoing support and training should be a key decision-making criterion when selecting technology providers. Contractors can use the checklist to identify technology vendors with the necessary implementation and implementation capabilities.

Maintaining the momentum

Implementation is an ongoing process and requires support over a period of time. It includes integrating new technology with existing systems, uploading relevant historical data, configuring the new platform to fit the way your teams work, and onboarding and training users.

It can be extremely helpful to create an onboarding and onboarding plan that holds you and your vendor’s implementation team accountable. Storing the action plan in a spreadsheet in the cloud will allow for necessary changes to be made during implementation and keep both teams on track.

During deployment, you need to do the following:

• Set expectations for stakeholders and users throughout the implementation process.
• Make sure stakeholders remain engaged in the process.
• Allow time for training and implementation.