It’s been just over three years since I began my journey into this world of being a construction technologist and it’s really been a wild and great ride. If you are in a similar role as mine, you might be a lot like me and continually writing your own job description as you go. When I started off the initial concept was to provide additional support for Mechanical’s technology consumers while surveying the tech landscape, testing out and bringing in, implementing technologies where they made sense within the organization.

Three years is like twenty one in tech years so a lot keeps involving and changing. The job is still keeping track of what is going on in the contech world, but that now we have several implementations in various stages of trial or adoption, the question becomes what’s next?

My job has evolved to start including more evangelizing on behalf of using technology in construction as well as on behalf of the specialty contractor. I’ve become intensely passionate about both things and the industry as a whole. I do still have that initial task of keeping eyes on the tech world.

This is where there the careful juggling act enters. We all look to push Lean mindsets which is this concept of Kaizen (continuous improvement). With all of the new tech constantly coming on to the market or the improvements being rapidly made in existing tech, there is temptation to consistently be ripping out tech and replacing with the latest thing and to end up in this perpetual state of implementation.

Of course we need to continually review the tech stack we are building. The current SaaS and other pricing models actually set themselves up well for realizing that something isn’t working and it is time to go in another direction. It is hard for us in construction to write off something we’ve paid for and move on. Often enough, we double down or just continue to suffer through. We need to realize that this just costs more in the end. It’s ok to realize something isn’t working for us, even if it is our own fault, and move forward.

That is one of the flaming axes you juggle. Making sure that you’re keeping tabs on how the stack is being utilized and adopted. Then you toss in the endless stream of flaming axes in terms of new tech, new tech news, new improvements on existing tech. The flaming ax that I find myself dropping, more often than not, is actually keeping up to date on the releases and improvements on the tech we actually own.

There are times when this could be a full-time job in itself. Being early adopters on many things means those technologies are also constantly and quickly improving. We need to be making sure we focus hard on those.

I often joke that I am the one person in the company that has to read their spam. You just never know when one of those emails will hint at the next big thing. I also need to be the one who pours through the release documentation and then communicate out to our teams what new and exciting things we can now do with the tech we already own.

So now that you’ve started to implement technology, it is not the time to sit back and survey your fiefdom as if you were done. There’s still work to do! Keep trumpeting adoption. Keep ensuring you’re squeezing every ounce of functionality out of what you have. Keep making sure what you own is truly the best for your company. The price of switching will be less than the price of riding the wrong horse.