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How to Make sure Non-recurring Engineering Costs Doesn’t Kill your IoT Project

How to Make sure Non-recurring Engineering Costs Doesn’t Kill your IoT Project

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Wienke Giezeman

- Publish Date: January 11, 2021

avatar

Wienke Giezeman

- Publish Date: January 11, 2021

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The biggest cliché on the internet is that hardware is hard. The problem with clichés is that they are true. So what we are facing here is that 90% of IoT projects don’t make it to the market. Which is good if the product idea was indeed not fitting a market need, it is bad if this is due to bad execution.

IoT failure can be distinguished between lack of business viability failure and lack of technical competence.

Too much has been written around business viability. And me telling you that your IoT PoC actually could have taken place in Excel is nothing new. So I won’t waste your time with the obvious.

With regards to technical competence, things can get a bit more complex.

So let’s take an IoT project. The differentiating characteristics of an IoT project are:

There are a huge amount of dependencies - the ROI of your project is based on many small technological features. A simple design feature in the power management of your sensor can reduce the lifetime by 50% increasing revisit costs by a multitude, totally kicking down your business case.

Long feedback cycles - the time between a design decision and actually knowing if that was the right decision can be very long. Worst case you only find out during your certification testing that you made a mistake.

Long project - the world changes. And if your project development process is hard. The problem you were solving also might have changed. Also here. The worst place to fail is with your product out in the market and on the shelves. Fail early.

So any project consists of scope, lead time (go to market), resources and quality. They play together in a zero-sum game, meaning that they affect each other. E.g. if you want to increase scope you either have to increase resources, increase the lead time or both.

Taking these basics it is understood that knowing very well what the problem is and so knowing what the scope is helps any project. But as we are already facing so much risk in IoT development, this is even more important.

Another important project management basics in your IoT adventure is that you have to do the riskiest part first. But if you don’t embrace failure as an outcome, it is almost certain you fail. That is very hard, for sure in a corporate context. This also typically makes RFQ and tendered IoT projects very risky.

So make sure that you pull forward the biggest challenges first. Do you feel radio design is one of your biggest concerns? Hire experts or invest more early on. If you think that low power is the most important because a sensor site revisit after installation is very expensive? Make sure you prioritize that. 

The beauty of IoT is that it is hard. And when it works. It can be something magical.

With The Things Conference, we open up all the knowledge to make sure you succeed in the Internet of Things. Make sure you take the right direction, make sure you see risks early, partner with the right companies and make sure you keep the iterations short so you can be agile and adapt to the situation.

Hope to see you all at this event full of knowledge and connections, coming online on January 25-29, 2021!

Join with the 10% discount code TTC2021-FRIEND-OF-IOT-FOR-ALL: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/conference/

Wienke Giezeman, Co-founder & CEO of The Things Industries

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