#1: Clients try to do it themselves

“Hey, let’s do it ourselves. We just need a simple IR sensor, a Time of Flight sensor and then a simple dashboard. That’s it. How difficult could this be?”

Turns out that solution development with IoT is time-consuming, if not difficult - even for a simple implementation like the one above. Because …

#2: Clients don’t know what they don’t know.

There are so many other variables than what meets the eye. E.g. some simple things such as what frequency do you ping the server, how much battery budget do you have, are there network issues, overall funds available and operation and maintenance. Even these simple things could be time-consuming if you are not professional in the IoT space. And clients should be spending bandwidth on the core domain area and not on the IoT.

#3: They try to reinvent the wheel in the area that you don’t have expertise.

Even for the platform players like us, we need to deal with large facets even for a seemingly simple solution. Hardware, connectivity, UIUX of the application layer. A lot of time we work with a large partnership network.

#4: They lose patience at seemingly not-so-successful PoC

Early PoC pilot stage is a very important one. They are very likely not to go the way you want them to. But most clients lose their patience when things don’t go as planned. A lot of times what is developed in the lab doesn’t really work well on the field. But in some way, it’s a good thing to know the failure-cases upfront at this stage. Go into the PoC with the mindset of this being step 1 of a long journey. And then …

Iterate!

If this is the way the expectations are set right at the start, then we are more likely to get all stakeholders to go into the PoC with the right mindset.

#5: Scaling of the solution: Think of every implementation as a product and not project.

The company need to understand that what they have implemented today is going to get evolved in the future. So you would always need to go back to your partner for more. In that sense, look at all implementations as the product and not just a project. You need to keep evolving it over the period of time.