Employee buy-in is vital to successful tech adoption. Effective solutions risk becoming wasted investments if your team lacks the enthusiasm and context surrounding them. According to a recent report on the state of digital adoption, companies lose an average of $17 million a year to failed digital and tech initiatives, and 26 percent of business leaders attribute that loss to a lack of employee adoption.

But I’m willing to bet there is nothing wrong with most of these “failed” solutions. When you clearly communicate the benefits and improvements to employees, tech adoption should come naturally. When you ensure everyone is on the same page through a clear understanding of the problem, why it needs to be fixed, and how the solution will come into play, you avoid having to sell your employees on the solution.

Businesses often come up short in clearly articulating the problem. At its core, it’s an issue in change management. While technology adoption tends to be a long and tedious process, a thoughtful approach to change management will help organize and unite the efforts to tackle the issue faster and more effectively. Everyone is engaged when everyone is considered.

Tech Should Be IT-Led

Ultimately a tech solution should benefit the business in some way, but to do that, it first needs to fit within the existing ecosystem. Too often, companies start their tech search by finding solutions that address business needs ahead of technical requirements. Doing this only adds work and drags out timelines as IT bends backward to rewind and rework the existing system around a new solution.

Instead, the search should start in IT. Teams should document and define all their system requirements, curate a list of potential solutions that are compatible at the technical level first, then pass it to business leaders to evaluate the best candidate for their needs. This way, there is no unnecessary backtracking, and a lot of time is saved.

Involve Employees Early

Employees are more receptive to tech when they feel a sense of ownership, especially when they are the intended end-user. As IT professionals, we may understand the technical requirements of a solution, but we don’t have as much insight into the users’ needs. Solutions can look great on paper and fail in practice. The digital adoption report I cited earlier found that over half of enterprises reported recent technology investments that didn’t meet their expectations.

Involving a small team of end-user employees from the get-go ensures user needs will be considered throughout the process. Their active involvement will also help prioritize these needs as your business wades through the tide of potential options. It’s incredibly beneficial to have the people that will actually be using the tech participate in its discovery and then implementation. And this same group of users makes excellent candidates for early adopters, enabling you to conduct a small-scale rollout and work out any kinks before introducing the solution company-wide.

Collaboration and Coordination

Successful tech adoption is a group effort involving coordination and collaboration. The workplace tends to use these terms interchangeably, but there is a marked difference between the two. Coordination involves dividing work into separate tasks that will come together to complete a goal. Most people think of this when it comes to group work, with each department assigned its own list of tasks to complete.

Collaboration is especially important for the planning and decision-making phases of a project. Don’t make the mistake of turning a collaborative task into a coordinated one. That’s how simple decisions become mile-long email chains. It may seem impossible sometimes to coordinate schedules to get everyone to come together, but it will still be faster than passing things back and forth.

Plan for the Big Milestones and Prepare to Be Flexible for the Rest

Tech implementation is an enormous and essential task. Because of this, we assume it requires extensive, painstaking, and meticulous planning to execute. That assumption often makes things worse. It’s an immutable truth of tech that something will always go wrong. It is all too easy to over-prepare and waste hours mapping out all the things that could go wrong, only to have something that was never on your radar be the problem in the end. You can (and should) reserve some resources to respond to the unexpected, but a proper plan should outline the big swings, not dive into every worst-case scenario.

This is why I prefer the agile method for large tech projects. You make a general plan, do the groundwork to know what you need to get started, and as soon as you have something tangible, start moving so you can start improving. Even the best-made plans will go wrong, so you might as well make progress instead of trying to avoid the inevitable.