Gaps in your smart buildings program

Hey friends, 

Smart buildings are created by long-term programs, not individual technologies or projects. 

But in our interviews with 50+ smart buildings technology buyers, we uncovered an inconvenient insight that is holding back our industry: 

Most buyers’ internal teams don’t have the capacity to own all 3 parts of their smart buildings program.

Those 3 parts are:

1. Strategy—Defining the who, what, where, and why technology matters for the organization.
2. Management—Creating the roadmap, securing the budget, and keeping things moving forward.
3. Deployments—Executing the individual projects that make up a successful program.

Without the smart building strategy, it’s pretty difficult to run a program and deploy projects. Without a program manager, there will be stops & starts and inconsistencies across buildings. Without deployment support, we see nonstrategic pilots, a lack of user engagement, and missed deadlines. 

To avoid these symptoms, Buyers can audit their programs to find the gaps they need to fill. 

Here’s how…

Smart Building Strategy

Step one is to ask whether you have a tailored smart building strategy that aligns with your business and sustainability goals. 

The effort to create one includes:

• Stakeholder Engagement: Facilitate engagement with all relevant stakeholders to ensure a collaborative and well-rounded approach to your smart building strategy.
• Use Case Development: Identify and develop specific use cases that align with business objectives.
• Research: Engage the vendors in a given technology category and assess the viability, feasibility, value proposition, and business case.
• Making the Business Case: Assess the financial viability and sustainability benefits of technology adoption.

Side note: This is the process we teach in our Smart Building Strategist course.

Program Management

Step two is to assess your team’s ability to keep the program moving forward, prioritize next steps, and ensure projects align with the smart building strategy.

This ongoing effort includes:

• Audits & Assessments: Facilitate comprehensive assessments of your buildings to help prioritize the roadmap.
• Standards Development: Establish standards and best practices to ensure the successful implementation of your smart building strategy.
• Planning & Budgeting: Prioritize projects, create a roadmap, and secure funding to enable deployments.
• Measure Success: Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure and communicate success to internal and external stakeholders.

Building owners have been growing their internal smart buildings teams, but this governance effort is still lacking in most programs.

Deployment Support

Finally, assess whether your team has the ability to run vendor selection processes, manage individual projects, and facilitate change management. 

This ongoing effort includes

• Vendor Evaluation & Selection: Guide vendor selection and negotiation to ensure technology solutions align with needs and budget.
• Pilot Design & Support: Create a strategic pilot process with clear success metrics and next steps if successful.
• Project Management: Manage the deployment process to get projects done.
• Change Management/Training: Provide change management strategies and employee training to ease the transition to new technology.

Whew, this to-do list can seem overwhelming. 

And sure, the likes of Google and Microsoft have the skillsets and resources to handle this—no problemo. But what about the majority of the market? 

While we’ve talked about the 5 Vital Roles of consultants and service providers before, our interviews have revealed that there’s actually a 6th Vital Role. The Buyer’s Consultant is an external resource that extends the owner’s staff to fill these gaps. 

Buyers, does this resonate? What gaps do you wish to fill in your smart building program?

Hit reply and let me know, 

—James and the Nexus Labs team