Top Tips and Pitfalls to avoid when building ConTech teams

ConTech Best Practices: Organizational Design

This is the second post in our ConTech Best Practices series where we seek to provide  evergreen educational content to serve as the foundation for the emerging role of a 'Construction Technologist’. This series aims to codify best practices for construction professionals who are employing technology solutions and delivering change programs.

All the articles in the series can be found here.

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This article is written by Erin Khan. She is an established AEC technology leader, with over a decade of combined experience in construction operations, data and process analysis, and software implementation. Founding Erin Khan Consulting in 2023, she currently provides technology and innovation services to both contractors and construction technology startups.

Prior to founding EKC, Erin served as the National Director of Construction Solutions for Suffolk Construction, overseeing national technology and innovation operations. Erin holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from USC, a certificate in Business Analytics from The Wharton School, and is EIT, LEED AP BD+C, and OSHA-10 certified.

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What does a digitally enabled contractor truly look like?

Does it involve the full adoption of BIM? Is it a company which seamlessly pilots and adopts new solutions? Or is it a contractor who has imbued a culture of innovation in its people - a world where everyone continues to explore better ways of working and are supported in doing so?

The answer shifts for every company and is defined by the sector they operate in, the nature of their projects, their business and strategic goals.

One thing is key though, contractors need an innovation or ConTech team to realize this future.

Here’s what I’ve learned on how to build, grow and develop sophisticated innovation teams to enhance the adoption of technology and transform your organization.

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Contents

1. Why do we need an innovation team?

2. Who should be on the team?

3. Top Tips and Pitfalls to avoid when building ConTech teams

4. Measuring Success

5. Takeaways for startups

Reading Time: 8 min

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Why do we need an innovation team?

Innovation is often discussed but seldom acted upon. It exists within all companies as people naturally seek to improve the way they complete their work to save time and allow them to focus on what’s important.

Having a team is valuable as it provides a pathway and mechanism to connect the innovative tendencies of your workforce to your strategic business priorities. They can monitor, seed and support innovative practices within your business and ensure there is no duplicative effort by connecting siloed business units. Additionally they will collaborate with the c-suite to understand business goals and foster directed innovation to help maintain and grow market position.

This team has four key pillars:

• Awareness & Education
  The team supports communication and education on innovation to the organization. This helps improve the visibility of innovative projects to reduce duplication and enhance organization scaling of solutions.

• Management
  The team supports the operational management and testing of new solutions. They work with teams to identify problem statements, discover possible solutions and manage the implementation and coordination of pilots including defining success metrics.

• Strategy
  The team supports the businesses strategic goals by prioritizing projects and coordinating on resource allocation. This is as the team's priorities are defined through a strategic goal setting process with the C-suite.

• People enablement
  The team provides support to the organization and offers a pathway for ideas on improvement to be shared. This allows the naturally curious and innovative people to be supported in deploying their ideas. Without this support they can become disengaged and leave to competitors.

Who should be on the team?

The team needs a wide variety of skills and experiences. Determining which skills to prioritize is dependent on the size and budget of the team.

If your organization can afford only one person to be focused on innovation, this person doesn’t actually need to be a ‘techy’ person. Tech can be learned.

The key skills required in a team of one is:

• The person needs to be passionate and driven in finding a better way.

• The person needs to be a strong communicator and adept at cross functional relationship building.

• The person needs to have the personality to support and spur culture change. Innovation can be a lonely endeavor fraught with pushback and setbacks.

If you have the budget and support for a team, this means one person doesn’t have to have all the skills. Here are the key skill sets to cover on the team:

• An IT person

  • IT support is required for software approval including assistance on security, software compatibility and setting up sandbox environments.

  • Having dedicated IT support allows pilots to be expedited and technical issues to be quickly resolved.

• A Culture Change person

  • This person is focused on driving engagement amongst the team’s stakeholders.

  • They are on the ground talking to people and bringing them together to find better processes and workflows.

  • They need to be passionate, have great communication and collaboration skills and have high emotional intelligence.

• A Field person

  • This person is an important link between the technology experience of the team and the pain points of the users.

  • They should have project experience, understand how things are built and have experienced the challenges the end users will face.

  • Most importantly they should be able to speak the language of the field. People in the field don’t always trust the office. They want to know they are heard, understood and know someone who is ‘one of them.’

Having a person from site on the team helps to reduce the alienation factor of technology proximity to the field.

• A Data person (nice to have)

  • This person will help with exporting pilot data into reports and integrating new software into existing reporting platforms to streamline workflows and improve real time visibility.

Top Tips and Pitfalls to avoid when building ConTech teams

Tips

1. Have somebody from the field with building / project experience
   This team member is a key internal stakeholder to convince before sharing pilots with the field.

2. A key team KPI should be the number of walks of a job site.
   It is important to set a goal and have the team on site. This allows them to hear first hand experience from the project team on their workflows, what is working (or not) and to develop relationships which support the team’s goals.

3. Be outstanding collaborators.
   There are a lot of people who need to work together for successful adoption including:

   • The customer success team from the startup

   • The project team running a pilot

   • The IT team providing operational and technical support

   The team's ability to form relationships with all of these stakeholders to identify and resolve issues quickly is critical to success and building trust in their role.

Tech adoption is not set and forget. It takes a team of people working together to train, support and push the roll out of a product.

Pitfalls

1. Don’t be just from the field.
   Team diversity is important. It brings new ideas and networks of internal relationships.

2. No processes.
   Have clearly defined processes that are continuously updated with lessons learned. An example is there should be a clear pilot process documentation which can be shared with stakeholders such as legal and IT so they understand their involvement and expectations.

3. Don’t throw tech out for its own sake.
   Often a higher up will see a new exciting tool or trend and force a pilot. Don’t do that. Trust the team and process to be intentional in finding what is needed and will be adopted.

Measuring Success

Innovation teams in construction companies can struggle to gain internal support as their contribution to the bottom line and ROI is not always clear.

As a team it is important to build case studies and data points which provide the contribution of your team to the business's strategic goals. Some ways this can be done are:

• Provide hard metrics

  • At the start of the year create a list of business goals and processes which can be compared against at the end of the year.

  • For example if a goal was reducing safety incidents on site, track and show the number of improvements including the initiatives the team supported.

• Track the adoption rate of technology

  • Use metrics such as number of users or number of logins to understand adoption saturation.

  • This will help to identify hot spots, prove success and identify innovation champions whom you can highlight as successful case studies.

• [Long Term] Track the change in business priorities

  • Over a 3-5 year period the businesses strategic goals should have shifted and changed as innovation practices help to achieve them.

  • For example if in Year 1 a key goal was safety and in Year 3 this is no longer a key goal, safety has improved and it could be attributed to the success of your team.

Overall, building a construction tech / innovation team is critical to the long term success of your organization. Being able to understand its value, how to build the team and to track and sell its success to the C-suite is integral in advancing the digital transformation of the industry.

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Erin Khan is an established AEC technology leader who provides technology and innovation services to both contractors and construction technology startups at her consultancy, Erin Khan Consulting. Prior to founding EKC in 2023, Erin served as the National Director of Construction Solutions for Suffolk Construction.

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Takeaways for startups

• There is strong alignment between how the innovation team at a construction company is structured and the composition of the accounts / support team.

• The key takeaways which the customer support team of your startup should follow are:

  • Have a clear piloting process
    For every new project there should be a clear piloting process where your team engages with the key company stakeholders (legal, IT, project team, innovation team) to understand what they need and how you can help. Have an internal document on who manages each key relationship and where you track and share your learnings on the company's priorities.

  • Have Field experience
    A member of your team should be from the field. They need to be able to speak the language of the field so that the project team knows that they are heard and the solution was built for them and the startup team has experienced and resolved the challenges they will face.

  • Track Site Walks
    Have your team (ideally someone with Field experience) on site walking with the project team. This will help you to proactively resolve queries and ensure a successful pilot.

  • Provide seamless reporting
    For every pilot the innovation team must report on the success of the pilot, alignment to strategic objectives and potential for enterprise scaling. Make this process as easy as possible for the team by providing easy reporting and customizing to their internal system requirements. This will help you understand what their priorities are and ensure your team focuses on these.