At my company, Datex Property Solutions, we were talking about “quality of life” issues in building & deploying our Real Estate Portfolio Management software platform, Datex BI Portal, without compromising on our religion around surrounding Clients with engagement & support.
By quality of life, I mean that there are certain activities that recur on an ongoing basis across the lifecycle of building, deploying, configuring, reconfiguring, adding users, pushing system updates, and maintaining uptime across all system layers of a SaaS software stack.
In this domain, the most basic of activities that place a "tax" on quality of life are those that require human interaction to get done.
One specific (and NOT infrequent) example of the tax in our world is the requirement to “Backdoor” Data and System Configuration updates in Client Environments, a set of tasks where human interaction is typically required.
The first step to improving quality of life in the above scenario is to “take inventory” of and formally document the activities, steps and scenarios that play out, and where practical, isolate the elements that would benefit from instrumentation.
Then, based on the learnings across multiple Clients, build interfaces to reduce and simplify those steps to drop-downs and clicks.
Over time, these sequences can then be scripted, turning what today is a high touch process into an automated one.
The mantra I embrace for achieving such goals is "ship the idea," "fix" and "iterate." This reconciles the notion that perfect is the enemy of good (enough), while avoiding the all-too-common All or None trap.
More importantly, it allows a focus on smaller bites, binary wins, and rapid course correction, so as to learn (and perfect) by DO-ing.
Measuring What Matters
Case in point, at Datex we have built a type of business intelligence tool that we call SURF that enables us to systematically surface User and Usage Patterns.
Needless to say, this seriously golden data that helps us make better products, better support our Clients, train better, and also educate Clients on what the data is telling them.
SURF started as a set of queries maintained on a spreadsheet, and grew into a standalone piece of software that not only do we use religiously, but we now expose to Datex clients as well.
In a similar, vein, we recently rolled out an ROI Calculator based on the learnings from SURF Data to help clients (and prospective clients) better understand their human capital allocation in time and dollars, and the resulting impact that systems, data and automation can offer their business.
Netting it out: Light is the best antiseptic, which is especially important in a market like Real Estate, which despite being: A) The biggest asset class on the planet; and B) A massive generator of data remains a technology laggard.
What’s Your Success Formula?
A final thought. The exercise of thinking about quality of life brought me back to a board game I used to play as a kid called ‘Careers.’
Careers was built around the notion of players having their own personal “Success Formula,” where the Success Formula was defined as a player's allocation of the 100% pie across three domains:
- Fame
- Happiness
- Money
What struck me about this is how apt a metaphor the Success Formula is for internalizing the notion of taking a deterministic approach to one's life and one's professional choices by really codifying a "plan of record" with respect to:
- Time and Attention Allocation
- Expected Outcome "Yields" for the Focus
- Resulting Behavioral Concentration Points (and Not)
It's a simple, specific and directed way of thinking about life, and one's path.
So, what's Your Success Formula?
Related: Datex ROI Calculator - Calculate YOUR Datex ROI Now
