17 Drivers of IoT & Edge Innovation
Imran Bashir
GenAI, MLOps, IoT | Architect | Engineer | Consultant ? I Partner with Tech Leaders To Solve IoT, GenAI & Video Analytics Complexities, Architect Advanced Systems, Cut Costs and Fast-Track Deployments - Let's Talk !
So you think that your IoT and Edge development is nimble and efficient? Think again. The probability is very hight that your development processes are horrendously slow with plenty of wasteful slack. The worst is that you're not even aware of it.
As a business leader, why should you care about the development speed and the developer productivity anyway? When the development, deployment and discovery process is slow, the pace of innovation slows down. The time that your team takes improving and maintaining existing functionality is the time that you take away from learning and creating new things. The longer it takes for the new hires to get up to speed on the project, the slower they are in contributing to the project. The more time it takes you to get insights from data, the bigger the delay in getting ROI for your business. The more labor intensive your testing process is, the more man hours you spend on the least productive activities.
Once you start to compound all these unrelated holdups, very soon you have a bloated turtle at hand instead of the "digital transformation" initiative that you had originally envisioned. Achieving rapid development velocity is not an automatic process. It requires conscious and concentrated effort to squeeze efficiency from every nook and corner of you IoT and Edge project. It makes no sense for the team that is tasked to create efficiencies for the business to be inefficient in its own processes. Unfortunately, that is the case with countless teams in the IoT space specially in the traditional industries that have not achieved maturity in the software and the cloud development.
When building modern IoT platforms, leaders must contend with the complexity of multiple engineering disciplines in parallel. I call these the "Drivers of IoT/Edge Innovation". Lacking in any of these drivers, intentionally or unintentionally, results in incremental developmental, operational and business outcome delays. These accumulated delays quickly snowball and start to manifest themselves in terms of inflated project costs, missed opportunities, and team frustrations.
Many of the following disciplines require highly skilled engineers. However, just hiring good engineers is not sufficient. Engineers are normally so mentally occupied with feature development and maintenance tasks that they tend to overlook even the most obvious hindrances in achieving higher development velocity. Most of the domains listed below can be complex on their own so the engineers working on them have plenty of room to be more efficient within their respective areas as well.
IoT leaders must be fully aware of their engineering teams' weaknesses in these subjects. They must actively work towards filling the knowledge, skills and the execution gaps in order to put the IoT development, deployment and innovation on steroids.
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Here are the 17 drivers for a highly successful IoT project:
In the future posts, I will be sharing my experiences on how to recognize and avoid the traps in individual drivers that can slow down the IoT innovation. But I wanted to touch upon two of the high priority drivers that are relatively easy to spot.
One of the biggest causes of IoT project delays is the lack of project coordination. It's a very challenging role with a mix of superb technology and people skills. The coordinator must earn the respect of the team and must have the breadth of technical knowledge to see through all the fluff in order to keep the project on track. As a leader, it's imperative that you speak to the engineers to uncover the project coordination issues. If you smell general negativity or discontentment among the team, you will be doing a disservice to the project for not replacing the coordinator. If you have a coordinator who is always ready to give pep talks but does not have the technical skills to sit down with the engineers and get them over the hurdles then it's your clue that the project needs a different coordinator.
Similarly, Project Documentation is widely acknowledged yet mostly ignored driver to achieve development speed and efficiency. I am not talking about writing books here. Instead it is all about having adequate and strategic documentation to save time every step of the way. It takes very little effort on the part of the engineers to do a quick write up for themselves and for others on how to use and build upon what they have engineered. The team can potentially gain thousands (yes, thousands) of hours over the entire lifecycle of the project by simply having this documentation in place. One of the ways to detect whether the appropriate level of documentation is in place is to observe the ramp up time of new hires, particularly the junior engineers or non-technical folks. If they are not able to get the end-to-end working environment up and running within a day or two of being on the project, then you should know that your engineering process is highly inefficient and your team is wasting a lot of time.
In a nutshell, speeding up the IoT development and deployment has to be a project on its own with periodic reviews and adjustments along the way. The time and resources spent on it will pay back several folds over the course of your IoT journey.