The IT industry is a big and rapidly evolving beast. 
The tech landscape is evolving so rapidly that sometimes it can be difficult to know whether you’re ahead of the curve or not because you need to spend so much of your time overcoming all sorts of daily challenges. 
It can also sometimes be difficult to distinguish between what are relatively minor and common business problems and actual paint points that are eroding the company’s long term success. 
Are the difficulties you’re facing updating one of your products a minor problem or a major pain point? 
Or how worried should you be that two of your best engineers decided to leave for new roles in the same week?

Problem vs pain point

Every company runs into problems. 
It is the nature of trying to achieve goals and grow a business, especially in rapidly evolving industries like tech. But it’s important to be able to distinguish between a business problem and a genuine pain point. A business problem might include an aesthetic or pricing issue with a product. Having to repeatedly tweak pricing might be annoying but it isn’t stopping your company from functioning properly. But business pain points do. 
Some examples of more serious pain points are employee retention issues or prolonged employee dissatisfaction. These aren’t just minor annoyances, they seriously impact long term productivity and revenue. If there’s an issue stopping your staff from being able to complete a task or making them so unhappy that their performance and motivation levels are in the gutter, then you’ve identified a pain point. 
In this guide, we look at five questions you can ask to help you gain clarity over what the company’s major pain points are. This will help you focus on the big issues and stop sweating the small stuff. 

Question 1 – What does good IT look like? 

This question might seem a little trivial at first but it’s an important one because it forces you to take a step back and consider – “what are we actually trying to achieve here?”. Without having a clear idea of what your goals are in terms of good performance, it can be very difficult to actually perform well. 
Therefore you should try and clarify:

• From your staff what they think good internal processes should look like
• From your customers what they are looking for in terms of their interactions with the company 
• What kind of profitability and growth the company is aiming for

Question 2 – What is the biggest inhibitor to IT / tech / digital growth? 

Look to identify what the single biggest issue is. 
One way to help define this is to look at what problems are taking up the most time for your staff to resolve each day or are continually being brought up at staff meetings. You can then look into whether you have a realistic plan to tackle them, what the deadlines are to solve the problems, and who are the key people responsible for overcoming them.

Question 3 – Where can IT / tech best solve our pain points?

It is beneficial to understand exactly where IT staff can be deployed to best solve pain points rather than just spreading resources too thinly across multiple areas. For example Is the most effective approach going to be in customer experience, customer churn, customer onboarding or is it instead better applied to specific internal or external issues?

Question 4 – What resources does the IT team need to succeed? 

Try to establish the toolkit required to be successful in overcoming paint points. The resource requirements might include the necessary budget, processes, documentation, software, or knowledge needed. If one of these factors is really limiting the overall ability of the company to tackle big problems then attention needs to be drawn to that specific factor. 

Question 5 – Are we understaffed?

At the end of the day, you need the people on board that can actually make a difference. You might have identified all the major issues and have put in place detailed plans on how you are going to overcome the challenges but you will always need good people who can go ahead and implement the plans. In some cases you may simply not have enough staff to overcome a challenge or your staff may not have the expertise or skill set required to execute the business’ goals. 
If you’ve identified that you don’t have the staffing resources needed to overcome your biggest pain points or are looking to bring in fresh talent that can fill some key skill or knowledge gaps, then Finite can help staff you up. Finite has access to a huge pool of Australian tech talent that could be just the answer to your company’s biggest pain points.  Get in contact with Finite here.

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