May 2023

The Total Economic Impact™ Of The Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By The Lucid Suite

To successfully navigate a future-fit digital transformation, all functions of an organization must become adaptive, creative, and resilient.1 Whether in information technology (IT) or customer experience (CX), moving too quickly or failing to optimize for the cloud can yield costly technical debt. Worse yet, hasty digital transformation can precipitate risky security gaps. A focus on alignment and collaboration can enhance employee and customer experience and lead to increased revenues and continuous improvement.2

Lucid Software commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite (the Lucid Suite).3

The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the Lucid Suite on their organizations. Lucid Suite products evaluated in this study include:

  • Lucidspark: A virtual whiteboarding application to support brainstorming and ideation.
  • Lucidchart: A virtual diagramming application to visualize complex ideas, systems, and processes.

Together, these applications offer a platform for visual collaboration that meets a wide spectrum of use cases for a broad range of roles. Bidirectional integrations dynamically overlay data and extend the value of the product further into an organization’s profit and cost centers.

Hours saved over three years with the Lucid Suite

692,000

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed six customers with experience using the Lucid Suite. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a global, industry agnostic organization that generates $15 billion in annual revenue and is supported by 10,000 full time employees.

Interviewees said that prior to using the Lucid Suite, their organizations lacked a corporate standard for visualization and collaboration tools, and they struggled with limited functionality. Interviewees’ organizations aimed to be more asynchronous and proactive while rapidly scaling agile software delivery and remote collaboration capabilities. Strict cloud security and data gravity standards further limited efficient and effective collaboration in the organizations’ prior environments.

The interviewees reported widespread adoption after investing in the Lucid Suite. Key results from the investment include reductions in organizational complexity, faster time to alignment with synchronous collaboration, faster time to productivity with newly onboarded hires, and fewer meetings with less follow-up work. Customers with agile delivery teams also reported multiple efficiencies and higher levels of reliability.

Consulting Team: Courtenay O’Connor, Nahida Nisa

Lucid logo

A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Lucid, May 2023

Table Of Contents

ESTIMATE YOUR TEI OF TEI

Key Statistics

  • icon

    ROI

    410%
  • icon

    Benefits PV

    $12.1M
  • icon

    NPV

    $9.7M
  • icon

    Payback

    < 6 months

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • Standardized collaboration, saving $758,000 in operating expenses. By declaring Lucid Suite products as its corporate standard, the composite organization curates a more consolidated and accessible technology stack while providing a streamlined and improved user experience.

  • Streamlined synchronous collaboration, saving 344,000 hours, worth $4.1 million in organizationwide user efficiencies. With Lucid Suite, the composite organization improves the quality of time spent in meetings, delivering faster time to alignment from valuable collaboration.

  • Asynchronous collaboration efficiencies, preventing 146,000 hours of organizationwide follow-up meetings, saving $2.6 million. The ability to remotely collaborate and clarify complex processes and systems through visualization on live documents allows the composite organization to avoid the need for costly additional meetings on visualizations of complex ideas.

  • Agile adoption enabled by the Lucid Suite, saving 126,000 hours of overhead, worth $3.2 million. Lucid Suite enables the composite to scale its adoption of agile delivery within and beyond its technical teams to further improve organizational alignment and flexibility while making agile ceremonies 30% more efficient.

  • Onboarding speed and efficiencies, preventing 76,000 hours of training and orientation worth $1.4 million, accelerating time to impact for new hires. The composite organization onboards 301 technical resources over three years. By the end of the investment period, the composite shortens the onboarding period for technical resources by 65%.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified in this study include:

  • Improved SLAs and availability. Interviewees said their organizations’ teams improved accountability for team objectives, cadence of onboarding new systems, and dependable delivery with the deployment of the Lucid Suite.

  • Streamlined mergers and acquisitions (M&A), opening new revenue streams. Consolidating information during mergers and acquisitions and promoting cross-organization and cross-team collaboration helps generate new revenue.

  • Reduced technical debt. With the Lucid Suite, interviewees’ organizations gained visibility into backlogs, which enabled an early focus on and easier maintenance of technical debt.

  • Improved user experience. Interviewees reported that users expressed higher satisfaction with the Lucid Suite than other platforms, and that it provided better insights on tool adoption.

  • Quality of output. Interviewees noted that using the Lucid Suite added to the depth, detail, and consumability of data and presentations.

  • Breadth of security and compliance controls. Several Interviewees discussed the value of the Lucid Suite’s built-in security protections.

  • Vendor quality. Interviewees reported that across its sales, customer success, and product teams, Lucid offers high-quality engagement that includes trainings and updates on new products.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

  • The Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite fees totaling $637,000. The composite sees rapid adoption of the Lucid Suite for user groups across the organization.

  • Internal deployment, training, and change management costs of $1.1 million. The composite dedicates resources toward technical implementation and security review. Training and change management costs scale with adoption.

  • Ongoing administration and enablement costs of $660,000. The composite organization devotes 30 minutes per month to ongoing administration of the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite. Monthly community practice meetings engage 30% of licensed users in enablement.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $12.1 million over three years versus costs of $2.4 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $9.7 million and an ROI of 410%.

The ROI Of Future-Fit Transformation

Forrester defines a future-fit strategy as follows:

A customer-obsessed approach to technology that enables a company to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities to meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience.1

According to Forrester research from 2020, firms with adaptive capabilities grew at a rate three times their industry’s average. These adaptive firms reap marketplace benefits by improving customer, employee, and partner experiences; differentiating their offerings; improving their ability to innovate; and changing their business models. Those qualities contribute to more alignment, continuous improvement, and higher organizational performance.

Core drivers of future-fit technology include the partners involved, the practices that activate them, and the core technologies like the Lucid Suite that may help enable change (see Figure 1).

Forrester research from 2023, found that, compared to respondents from US organizations with no alignment, respondents from US organizations with high levels of alignment across marketing, CX, and digital reported:

  • 2.4 times higher revenue growth.
  • 1.8 times higher customer retention growth.
  • 2.0 times higher profitability growth.

Figure 1. Pillars of future-fit technology

figure

Benefits (Three-Year)

Reduction in organizational complexity Synchronous collaboration efficiencies Asynchronous collaboration efficiencies Agile delivery teams efficiencies Onboarding savings

“The Lucid Suite provides a key collaboration tool, which is important in this hybrid world. Our teams can continually collaborate both in and outside of meetings, [work] in a visual format, [and bring] together integrations to some of our other tools so that people can collaborate better.”

Manager of IT governance, biotech

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment in the Lucid Suite.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that the Lucid Suite can have on an organization.

  1. DUE DILIGENCE

    Interviewed Lucid stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to the Lucid Suite.

  2. INTERVIEWS

    Interviewed 6 representatives at organizations using the Lucid Suite to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.

  3. COMPOSITE ORGANIZATION

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. FINANCIAL MODEL FRAMEWORK

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. CASE STUDY

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

DISCLOSURES

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Lucid and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in the Lucid Suite.

Lucid reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Lucid provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Interviews

Role Industry Number of employees
Manager of IT governance Biotech 1,900
Senior director Software 4,500
Senior manager Insurance 4,851
Agile coach Fintech 24,000
Vice president Financial services 25,000
Technology strategy manager Financial services 50,800

Key Challenges

Interviewees said that before implementing the Lucid Suite, their organizations used a multitude of virtual diagramming and whiteboarding tools in their stacks, and that heterogenous environments spurred complexities. Common challenges included:

A lack of adequate visualization and collaboration tools. Nearly all interviewees said their organization had legacy visualization tools that were static and insufficient for users’ tasks. This led to inefficient processes to synchronize visualizations with other workflows and data sources and left the organizations with rote, manual steps that limited them from pursuing higher-value activities.

  • The vice president at a financial services organization said: “[In our previous environment,] there were a lot of data centers and applications that we hosted. But, for the end user, we weren’t using very large collaborative platforms. We had rudimentary diagramming [capabilities]. We could put up diagrams as flat files created on the computer, but they weren’t that consumable, they weren’t that great, they were pretty basic, and they didn’t have that much functionality.”
  • The technology strategy manager at a financial services organization noted: “The big problem was that we didn’t have one enterprise standard for whiteboarding. We had more than six whiteboarding tools used at the enterprise level.”
  • The agile coach at a fintech organization said: “There’s always been a need for us to collaborate in a hybrid fashion with people onsite and remote. We tried all kinds of things. We did [physical] whiteboards and taking pictures and videos, but that really didn’t work well.”
  • The manager of IT governance at a biotech organization noted: “We used a combination [of collaboration tools]. [It was] a little bit of everything.” They also described how their organization leveraged some tools from existing virtual meeting solutions. They said, “Teams would have to take screenshots and manually transfer the information back into the static visualization tools.”
  • The senior director at a software organization described complex compliance requirements that were difficult to track and maintain with the legacy tools in their organization’s prior environment. They said: “We have ISO (International Organization for Standardization), SOC (systems and organizational controls), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), [and] PCI (Payment Card Industry) [requirements]. Each one of those requires in-depth documentation and SSPs (system security plans) and architectural diagrams. If you’re tracking everything in spreadsheets, stuff gets missed — especially when you’re filtering through 50 different columns to make sure things are on track. Sharing diagrams individually meant they could often get bifurcated, and we’d have to fork versions of them. It was a very tedious process. It’s giving me anxiety just walking down memory lane.”

No corporate standard for collaboration solutions. Interviewees noted that in their organizations’ prior environments, there were too many solutions for virtual collaboration. This led to confusion and wasted time in meetings.

  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared that the lack of adequate tooling prompted their organization to use internal resources to develop its own solution. They said, “We had one team actually spin out their own custom-built whiteboarding tool, and some other teams were using that.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry pointed out that versioning problems with their organization’s various tool sets and silos prevented effective collaboration.

The desire to be more asynchronous and proactive. Interviewees said the lack of appropriate tools stymied the ability of their organization’s teams to work more efficiently and effectively.

  • The senior director in the software industry said their firm’s security organization was very reactive prior to using the Lucid Suite. Instead, before implementing the Lucid Suite, the organization largely addressed security issues only as they arose day-to-day. The interviewee said, “We wanted to switch to being proactive.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry described pain points with the meeting frequency in their organization’s prior environment. They said: “[It was] very meeting- heavy — very heavy. [But that] seems to be how we get things done, unfortunately. That’s why we wanted to be more asynchronous.”

The need to rapidly shift to remote collaboration abilities. Interviewees noted that during the COVID- 19 pandemic, their organizations rapidly shifted toward remote work and needed secure collaborative solutions to avoid massive business disruption.

  • The senior manager at an insurance organization described how the pandemic served as a catalyst for their firm to search for an effective visual collaboration tool to reach its team’s goals. They said: “We went from a culture of nearly everyone [working] in the office to everyone [working] at home within about two weeks’ time. We had no idea how long that was going to last, and we still needed to accomplish the goals of DevOps.”
  • Similarly, the manager of IT governance in the biotech industry said, “The pandemic was a key part [of adopting the Lucid Suite], especially because a lot of our engineering staff [was] working remotely.”

Strict cloud security standards. Two out of the six interviewees said serious prior data breaches in their organizations’ underscored the vulnerabilities of the legacy collaboration environments. Regardless of prior breach history, interviewees noted that their firm’s security organization blocked some tools that fell short of data gravity and security standards.

  • The vice president in the financial services industry shared how the Lucid Suite enabled their organization to transform into a more secure, cloud-based collaboration environment. They explained: “Post-breach, we’ve done a major transformation. We made a very big change in how we’re doing our work, and we’ve changed over all of our end-user tools to be cloud-based and more collaborative.”
  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry expressed: “There were serious security lapses with some of these tools that we used. There were a lot of data-exfiltration risks.”
  • Similarly, the agile coach in the fintech industry shared that their organization used one tool that was decommissioned due to perceived information security issues.

Solution Requirements

The interviewees’ organizations searched for a solution that could:

  • Support multiple use cases for a wide range of user roles. The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared why their organization declared the Lucid Suite as its corporate standard for visual collaboration. They said, “The Lucid Suite capabilities and features could work for a very large user base and [a] very large number of use cases.”

  • Facilitate real-time collaboration and ensure business continuity during the pandemic. The vice president in the financial services industry expressed appreciation for the collaboration functionality the Lucid Suite offers. They said: “A lot of folks were using [a product] that’s on your computer, and you couldn’t collaborate in real- time, but you can in Lucidchart. That’s one of the big reasons why I evangelize Lucidchart: because you can do real-time collaboration.”

  • Improve user experience and productivity in cloud-based, remote, and hybrid environments. The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry said: “[My organization’s investment objective for the Lucid Suite was] to enhance the overall productivity experience for our remote and hybrid workforce. We’re trying to make it easy for everybody to do their jobs so they’re not struggling in their day-to-day activities, and they can spend more of their timeshare in innovation and doing something new with the tools to do it.”

  • Deliver a secure, cloud-based collaboration environment. The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry noted the importance of strict adherence to data protection, including compliance with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and HIPAA: “The Lucid Suite came across as one of the most secure [solutions] in terms of controls [and] compliance, and we have a very heavy- handed information assessment.”

“Once the breach happened, we moved our whole working model from applications and working on our desktops to working cloud-based.”

Vice president, financial services

Lucid Suite Use Cases

Interviewees provided examples of how their organizations use the Lucid Suite.

The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared how the Lucid Suite served multiple teams’ needs and noted that design, brand, and agile delivery teams spend about 80% of their time using Lucidchart for their whiteboarding tools. The interviewee expanded:

  • “The scrum masters, what we call the ‘agile delivery leads,’ are using the Lucid Suite not only for collaboration, but also [for] getting their work done. They’re designing a lot of journeys and products using this tool.”
  • “We also have a large population spread across the entire enterprise that is using this tool for collaboration purposes. When we have a meeting, we need a virtual whiteboard to sketch out, brainstorm, talk about solutions, and design.”
  • “We have a combination of product managers, software engineers, and platform engineers [who use the Lucid Suite]. Software engineers are full- stack developers. Platform engineers are providing support to SaaS platforms. Then, product managers are working with the stakeholders to understand gaps and then create those product visions and roadmaps.”

The senior manager in the insurance industry said the Lucid Suite was central to their organization’s digital transformation and their team’s goals around DevOps and continuous improvement. They said:

  • “I came in to drive the continuous-improvement portion of the [digital] transformation [effort and looked] at how we [could] improve our processes of delivery. ... That was all brand new. The Lucid Suite was the primary tool that we used to collaboratively document everything we’re doing and use the process of DevOps to help the team start to collaborate and go after their impediments.
  • “The Lucid Suite is pretty prevalent across IT and [with employees] outside IT because they were part of our workshops, picked it up, and started to use it. They’ve been using it for all sorts of things outside of a visual-mapping software.”

The agile coach in the fintech industry characterized a wide range of ways in which the Lucid Suite was deployed across their organization. They said:

  • “Our product strategy folks are using [the Lucid Suite] to develop better products. They use Lucidchart for wire-framing and creating and describing user interfaces. [They also] use it for design-thinking activities around our products.”
  • “We have a whole team doing a ton of value- stream mapping across the enterprise, and this is one of the tools that we use to do that.”
  • “[We use Lucidspark as] a digital white space with all kinds of tools and templates with voting sessions, stickies, and affinity grouping.”

The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry shared how their organization uses the Lucid Suite:

  • “[We use Lucidchart for] a little bit of everything. Our engineering teams use it for their projects. Lab teams are using it to do their process improvements. We also have our project management, cloud architects, and scientists use it. It’s open to pretty much anyone. Lucidspark is very much our whiteboarding tool moving forward. We are encouraging everyone to use it.”

“So many people use Lucidchart all over our organization. I'm probably not even giving it justice for all of the ways people are using it in the industry.”

Vice president, financial services

Composite Organization

Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the six interviewees, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite organization has the following characteristics:

Description of composite. The composite organization is global, industry agnostic, and moving toward a digital-first approach. In this capacity, the composite organization increases the level of mission-critical software it develops for both internal and external use cases. It generates $15 billion in revenue annually and is supported by 10,000 full time employees (FTEs).

Deployment characteristics. The composite begins deployment of licensed Lucid Suite applications within its technical teams in IT. Staff including developers, architects, DevOps, and cybersecurity professionals prove out initial use cases and the value of the product suite.

Adoption of the Lucid Suite organically spreads across technical and nontechnical teams in years 2 and 3 of the investment, and the total number of licenses grows to 1,700.

As the composite organization demonstrates the value of improved collaboration with its Lucid Suite investment, it further scales the use of nonlicensed, read-only collaboration capabilities across all of its users by the end of Year 3.

Key assumptions:
  • $15 billion annual revenue
  • 10,000 FTEs
  • Global operations
  • Industry agnostic

Total Benefits

Ref. Benefit Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total Present Value
Atr Reduction in organizational complexity $155,925 $316,575 $472,500 $945,000 $758,378
Btr Synchronous collaboration efficiencies $206,768 $1,278,489 $3,759,425 $5,244,683 $4,069,086
Ctr Asynchronous collaboration efficiencies $92,569 $763,130 $2,550,000 $3,405,699 $2,630,693
Dtr Agile delivery team efficiencies $75,272 $873,819 $3,207,600 $4,156,691 $3,200,511
Etr Onboarding savings $45,619 $467,735 $1,347,840 $1,861,195 $1,440,682
Total benefits (risk-adjusted) $576,154 $3,699,749 $11,337,365 $15,613,268 $12,099,350

Reduction In Organization Complexity

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported many ways in which their organizations reduced complexity by standardizing Lucid Suite products in their organizations.

  • The senior director in the software industry said using the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite applications contributed to decreasing organizational complexity at their firm. They said: “When we moved to using Lucidchart at the enterprise scale, it was a massive change for us. We are using less tooling. We just started doing [things] a better way in the Lucid Suite products, so we’ve reduced some licenses there.”
  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry said their organization also reduced the number of tools in its environment, with several levels of simplification and savings. They said: “One of the key issues identified by our associates was that six to seven tools were not working for them as some people had access to something and some people have access to some other things. It is very hard to collaborate unless everybody has license or access or knowledge or the skills to use one specific tool. ... [With the Lucid Suite,] we have actually decommissioned three tools from our tenant. Overall in the virtual whiteboarding space, we were able to reduce our costs by about 30% of what it used to be, so there’s a huge benefit for us.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry noted that per-user cost savings of $20 with the Lucid Suite only partially reflected their firm’s reduction in organizational complexity. They said: “We wouldn’t have had as many people using [the legacy solution] as we have using Lucidchart and Lucidspark. Because we’ve gotten the enterprise version of the Lucid Suite, it’s part of the [organizational] toolkit now. We’re giving them more with the Lucid Suite because these are more collaborative tools than you would get with [the legacy solution].”

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • In its prior environment, the composite organization’s legacy tech stack for virtual collaboration and whiteboarding cost $525,000 annually.
  • With the Lucid Suite, the composite organization decommissions one of three other collaboration and visualization solutions each year. By the end of the three-year period, the composite organization fully decommissions all three legacy collaboration tools and declares Lucid Suite as its organizationwide visual collaboration solution.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the benefit will vary between organizations depending on the following factors:

  • The number of legacy tools and their users previously deployed at an organization. Organizations that retain multiple collaboration tools may not experience the full range of this benefit.
  • The rate at which the organization decommissions its prior tools.
  • The number of users.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $758,400.

Cascading reduction in complexity

In describing how the Lucid Suite helped reduce organizational complexity in their organization, the technology strategy manager in the financial services industry noted several ways in which their firm was able to reduce or eliminate several cost categories.

  • Lowered cost of licenses. The manager said: “There were savings in terms of the cost of licenses, which we were paying for up front. [A solution we decommissioned] was a more expensive tool than the Lucid Suite, so we had savings going to a tool that was better and more cost-effective.”

  • Eliminated unused licenses. The manager said: “A lot of people were not using [the other products we decommissioned] because [they] didn’t meet their needs. So, we were able to peel off those licenses and the amount of money we were spending on supporting [this] multitude of tools. We were also able to peel back the teams and really concentrate on what we want to offer.”

  • Avoided engineering. The manager said: “[Prior to using the Lucid Suite], an engineer got excited and created a whiteboarding tool. They had a manager who was [on the project] 50% [of the time] and then two dedicated resources for about six months. It did not have infinite canvas, so we were constantly battling [and] working in multiple boards. It was just so off-plan and feature- limited, and we are not a company in the business of developing productivity tools.”

Reduction In Organizational Complexity

Ref. Metric Source Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
A1 Percent of legacy tech stack decommissioned with Lucid (legacy decommissioning rate) Interviews 33% 67% 100%
A2 Cost of legacy virtual collaboration and whiteboarding tech stack in prior environment Composite $525,000 $525,000 $525,000
At Reduction in organizational complexity A1*A2 $173,250 $351,750 $525,000
Risk adjustment ↓10%
Atr Reduction in organizational complexity (risk-adjusted) $155,925 $316,575 $472,500
Three-year total: $3,669,375 Three-year present value: $3,010,272

Synchronous Collaboration Efficiencies

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that with a more consolidated and accessible technology stack, the Lucid Suite helped improve meetings at their organizations with faster time to valuable and substantive collaboration when coming together live.

  • The agile coach in the fintech industry shared how the Lucid Suite simplified their organization’s collaboration environment because all employees are able to view Lucid Suite documents. They said: “Lucidspark is just super simple. People show up, and it’s not a heavy lift. They can start adding stickies right away without a whole lot of instruction and guidance. Within 2 minutes, they’re participating and joining in.”
  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry reported user difficulties with many visual collaboration solutions. They said: “We wanted an enterprise-level tool that everybody has access to. Now, we are starting whiteboards even before the meetings, so I have ideas and things that I can start thinking about and building on. I’ve already saved that time that I need to organize everything. I can go into that meeting much more well-prepared and get to the specific objectives and nail those.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry shared: “People are jumping right on [meetings] when they are miles away with the hybrid model. Many people work better visually than they do just with words and are more productive when people can put pictures in front of people and work together. Our lab teams are able to whiteboard their issues with multiple people across the organization coming to a common place and map out what they are talking about visually. To me, that is a big deal.”

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite organization improves time to value with synchronous collaboration by decreasing the amount of time it takes in meetings to get to valuable discussion.
  • In the composite organization’s prior environment, the 10,000 employees spent 30% of their days in meetings on average (2.4 hours of meetings per 8-hour workday) totaling 6.24 million hours of synchronous meetings annually.
  • Prior to using Lucidspark, the composite had multiple collaboration tools with varying degrees of adoption across the company. As a result, employees wasted 207,792 hours (or 3.33% of total meeting time) familiarizing participants with the interface and functionality of whichever tool they were using in the prior environment.
  • By using Lucidspark as the singular corporate standard for visual collaboration, participants improve virtual alignment in synchronous meetings. This impact scales with adoption and, by the end of the three-year period, the composite organization effectively eliminates time wasted due to multiple tools.
  • The composite organization decommissions one- third of its legacy collaboration tech stack in Year 1, and this number increases to 67% decommissioned in Year 2. By the end of the three-year period, the composite organization fully decommissions all of its legacy collaboration tools and declares the Lucid Suite as the organizationwide visual-collaboration solution.
  • The composite recaptures more than 344,000 hours of meeting time spent aligning participants with the legacy visual-collaboration technology at an average rate of $43 per end user.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the benefit will vary between organizations depending on:

  • The rate at which the organization decommissions its prior tools, which may prevent it from experiencing the full range of this benefit.
  • The level at which the organization holds meetings. Meeting-heavy team cultures may see more benefit from this amplifier.
  • The number of users and their level of adoption.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $4.1 million.

Hours saved with improved synchronous collaboration

344,000

Synchronous Collaboration Efficiencies

Ref. Metric Source Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
B1 Number of virtual collaboration users Composite 10,000 10,000 10,000
B2 Percent of day spent in meetings Composite 30% 30% 30%
B3 Total hours of synchronous collaboration annually B2*B1*2,080 hours 6,240,000 6,240,000 6,240,000
B4 Percent of time wasted per 60-minute meeting in the prior environment due to multiple collaboration tools Interviews 3.33% 3.33% 3.33%
B5 Total hours wasted from multiple collaboration tools in the prior environment B3*B4 207,792 207,792 207,792
B6 Percent reduction in time wasted with the Lucid Suite Interviews 50% 75% 99%
B7 Legacy decommissioning rate A1 33% 67% 100%
B8 Hours recaptured from streamlined synchronous collaboration with the Lucid suite B5*B6*B7 34,286 104,415 205,714
B9 Average fully burdened salary of an end user TEI standard $43 $43 $43
B10 Productivity recapture rate Composite 50% 50% 50%
Bt Synchronous collaboration efficiencies B7*B8*B9*B10 $243,257 $1,504,105 $4,422,853
Risk adjustment ↓15% 10,000 10,000 10,000
Btr Synchronous collaboration efficiencies (risk-adjusted) $211,113 $1,279,769 $3,763,188
Three-year total: $5,244,683 Three-year present value: $4,069,086

Asynchronous Collaboration Efficiencies

Evidence and data. Interviewees shared many ways in which the Lucid Suite helped their organizations work more efficiently and collaboratively outside of meetings. Reported benefits of asynchronous collaboration with Lucid Suite included:

Fewer meetings. With the Lucid Suite concurrent collaboration capabilities, interviewees reported that their organizations’ teams decreased the need for meetings to brainstorm and follow up on progress.

  • The senior director in the software industry shared how the Lucid Suite helped their organization cut down the number of meetings required to manage cloud-infrastructure security. They said: “Each cloud is different, so we maintain 12 to 15 different architectures in Lucidchart annually. When discussing architecture diagrams amongst my teams, I probably have 20 people on a call. If that’s a 1- hour call, that has a huge time cost. Once we moved over to Lucidchart, we licensed all of our engineers and security teams and were able to really use the tool. Now we don’t even need to have those meetings. It made it massively faster. Probably on average, it [previously took] one to two months to complete the process, [but that’s] down to a week or so with Lucidchart.”
  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared similar feedback: “Some meeting types are eliminated completely because everyone has access to the board. [Prior to using the Lucid Suite,] in the first meeting of a project, I would have to brainstorm ideas. Now, I’m not going to have that meeting. We’ve already done that by putting it on the board. We are only going to meet to review and provide feedback rather than starting from scratch. ... There’s a lot of work you can do offline that you don’t really need to have people on a [live] meeting [for] because everybody can see and edit the board.”
  • The senior manager in the insurance industry discussed how their organization completes complex projects asynchronously with the Lucid Suite. They said: “With the ability for us to collaborate, change, [and] alter [documents], we avoid any type of meetings where we’d have to come back together and draw the map on a whiteboard. All that stuff [now resides] in one collaborative tool, whereas before, it was a little bit more clunky.”

“The biggest impact is on alignment. While it does save time, it's a tool to use that we can use to make sure that we're all on the same page, regardless of the scale or the scope of what we're looking at.”

Agile coach, fintech

Less post-meeting work. Interviewees said that prior to using the Lucid Suite, their organizations’ collaboration processes were analog and required resources to take photos of the results post-meeting and manually transcribe them into the appropriate applications. With the Lucid Suite, the live, visual collaboration functionality permitted concurrent effort regardless of geographic location and with rapid integration into relevant toolsets.

  • The senior manager in the insurance industry described the impact of the Lucid Suite on live collaboration at their organization. They said: “When we’re all in Lucid Suite tools, you can be working on something, and I can see exactly what you’re doing. You can see what I’m doing. Updates are tracked. I can watch you do things whether we’re on a video conference or not. I don’t have to take a picture of it on my phone. I have it there, and I can work with it later. [With the Lucid Suite] integrations, I can put it into other tools. I believe it will save at least 30 minutes of post-meeting work per meeting, and I think your level of accuracy increases when you’ve got it in front of everybody.”
  • The senior director in the software industry shared: “The Lucid Suite reduced the need to replicate data in multiple places. We were doing it individually and then sharing them and having somebody else then edit it and maintain all of them. We have a bunch of different service teams that all have to weigh in and make sure their portions of the architecture are correct, so nothing is missed.”
  • The senior manager in the insurance industry shared: “There are huge advantages to everyone [being able to] come back to alter and change something in Lucidchart. Prior, the translation and the publication of all that effort in a face-to- face environment would have been on the backs of two to three people per workshop.”

Improved workflows. With less time spent getting through complicated workflows, some interviewees discussed how the Lucid Suite impacted teams’ availability and ability to collaborate.

  • The senior manager in the insurance industry noted: “Everyone knows to go to do their charting work in one area [that is] accessible anywhere on or off our network. Most of the improvements that teams are experiencing are coming from the collaborative nature of what the teams are using the tool to do. The more our users are finding uses for the Lucid Suite, the more productive they are.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry described ways in which one team at their organization achieved efficiencies asynchronously by altering workflows. They said: ‘’The CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) team does a lot of documentation. Previously, they would have to do it in another tool and then upload that document to [another collaboration tool] where everybody could see it. Now, part of that workflow has changed because there’s some more efficiencies using Lucidchart. We just do everything by link, so they put stuff in the cloud with automation so everything can be documented, easily collaborated on before it can go into production, and then easily found later.”

“We are updating architectural diagrams constantly and would not be able to do it at the speed that we need without Lucidchart, for sure.”

Senior director, software

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite organization decommissions one- third of its legacy collaboration tech stack in Year 1, and this increases to 67% decommissioned in Year 2. By the end of the three-year period, the composite organization fully decommissions all of its legacy collaboration tools and declares the Lucid Suite as the organizationwide visual collaboration solution.
  • In its prior environment, employees spent 30% of each day in meetings that were evenly split between standing and one-off meetings. Technical team members needed to follow up on technical collaboration efforts for 20% of the one- off meetings.
  • With the Lucid Suite, technical teams streamline their diagraming with asynchronous collaboration, which eliminates the need for 25% of follow-up meetings in Year 1. This impact scales as the Lucid Suite is adopted across the organization, with 50% of follow-up meetings for technical teams eliminated in Year 2, and 75% eliminated in Year 3.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the benefit will vary between organizations depending on the different types of projects the organization manages. Lucid may not provide the same value to organizations with projects that are simpler and easily delivered remotely.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.6 million.

Hours of follow-up meetings avoided

146,000

Asynchronous Collaboration Efficiencies

Ref. Metric Source Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
C1 Legacy decommissioning rate A1 33% 67% 100%
C2 Number of technical resources using Lucid C1*1,000 330 670 1,000
C3 Percent of day spent in one-off, follow-up meetings in the prior environment B2*20% 6% 6% 6%
C4 Hours spent in one-off, follow-up meetings per resource in the prior environment C3*2,080 125 125 125
C5 Total hours of one-off meetings for technical resources in the prior environment C2*C4 41,250 83,750 125,000
C6 Percent of follow-up meetings avoided for technical resources with Lucid Interviews 25% 50% 75%
C7 Total hours of follow-up meetings avoided with Lucid C5*C6 10,312.5 41,875.0 93,750.0
C8 Average fully burdened salary of a technical resource TEI standard $64 $64 $64
C9 Productivity recapture rate D9 50% 50% 50%
Ct Asynchronous collaboration efficiencies C1*C7*C8*C9 $108,900 $897,800 $3,000,000
Risk adjustment ↓15%
Ctr Asynchronous collaboration efficiencies (risk-adjusted) $92,565 $763,130 $2,550,000
Three-year total: $3,405,695 Three-year present value: $2,630,689

Agile Delivery Team Efficiencies

Evidence and data. Interviewees described how the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite improved and streamlined their organization’s agile delivery teams.

  • The senior director in the software industry explained how the Lucid Suite enabled their organization to scale the adoption of agile delivery while saving time on planning overhead. They said: “We’re a scrum-agile shop. We did change how we do planning, and the Lucid Suite helped facilitate that. There was a lot of overhead, and the team leads and our PMO (project management office) organization [was] doing it manually. We started using Lucidchart for all of our quarterly planning, OKRs (objectives and key results), and sprint planning, [and] it reduced our planning overhead probably by 50% at least, if not more. We’ve been very fortunate that we are good at planning and executing. [Without] the Lucid Suite, we wouldn’t be able to achieve that level of effectiveness.”
  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry described how their organization’s agile delivery evolved with the adoption of Lucid tools. They said: “[Previously,] we were very mature [with] a very well- established all-agile delivery practice within the organization. Before [the pandemic] hit us and we went remote, we were doing everything on [physical] whiteboards [and] then our ADL (advanced distributed learning) team would have to type everything in [another solution], which took them days. Now, it’s gone from days to maybe a few hours. I saw about 30% savings on time within my team. There are a lot of efficiencies that can be achieved sheerly by using [the Lucid Suite].”

Interviewees further outlined many additional ways in which the DevOps underpinning their software delivery derived value from the Lucid Suite.

Quality and speed improvements. Interviewees said the Lucid Suite helped improve the quality of their organizations’ software and the speed with which issues are resolved.

  • The vice president in the financial services industry pointed out how Lucidchart helped to find bugs: “It’s easier to identify when something goes wrong. Lucidchart makes it more visible.”
  • The senior manager in the insurance industry shared measurable impacts to DevOps: “We have used Lucid to help in our overall drive for continuous improvement. We have avoided more service disruption and delivered things in such a way that the quality is getting better. We can show the value of what we’re doing. ... The high- water mark for change failures from when we first started to measure was 962 in one month down to a low-water mark of 318 with the Lucid Suite. [Our mean time to remediate bugs,] went from about 1,200 hours to 54 hours in our last month.”

“One of my team leads started doing all of the quarterly, annual, and sprint planning in Lucidchart. It was so impressive that we started using that to maintain and facilitate all of our projects, cross-team collaboration, scrum and sprint ceremonies.”

Senior director, software

Value-stream mapping. Interviewees mentioned gaining the ability to conduct value-stream mapping, which was an exercise not possible with the solutions their organizations used before the Lucid Suite.

  • The senior manager in the insurance industry said their organization used the Lucid Suite to identify ways to bring more products to market faster. They said: “We have a value-stream- mapping process improvement right now. A group was funded to deliver two new products a year, and [it has] not been able to do that. Lucidchart was the helper to identify where those big impediments were in documenting and watching the improvement process as part of a collaborative effort.”
  • The agile coach in the fintech industry shared: “We use value-stream mapping to largely focus on speed to market. If we didn’t have the Lucid Suite, we wouldn’t have done value stream mapping during [the pandemic].”

Hours of agile ceremonies saved

126,000

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite organization decommissions one- third of its legacy collaboration tech stack in Year 1, and this increases to 67% decommissioned in Year 2. By the end of the three-year period, the composite organization fully decommissions all of its legacy collaboration tools and declares Lucid Suite as the organizationwide visual collaboration solution.
  • In its prior environment, all of the composite’s technical teams worked in agile. Agile ceremonies consisted of 192 hours of monthly, two-day sprint planning and 70 hours of daily, 20- minute scrums per resource.
  • One-third of the composite’s technical teams switches to the Lucid Suite each year of the investment period, and all of them are licensed by the end of Year 3
  • To align with technical teams in supporting the composite organization’s move toward a digital- first, software-driven approach, a small portion of nontechnical teams use the Lucid Suite to facilitate a transition to agile delivery in years 2 and 3.
  • By using Lucid Suite for agile planning and delivery, the composite organization delivers 10% efficiencies each year and achieves 30% more efficient agile ceremonies by the end of Year 3.

“You could see our revenue growth [during the pandemic], and the reason was [that] we were all in this collaborative mindset. There are a lot of reason we made a lot more money during [the pandemic]. We were so easily able to pivot to work at home, and I know a lot of other companies couldn't and didn't do it as easily as we did.”

Vice president, financial services

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the benefit will vary between organizations depending on the following factors:

  • The number and salary of agile employees.
  • The amount of time spent on planning and delivery of agile ceremonies.
  • The organization’s agile maturity and delivery format.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.2 million.

Agile Delivery Team Efficiencies

Ref. Metric Source Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
D1 Legacy decommissioning rate A1 33% 67% 100%
D2 Hours of two-day sprint planning for agile delivery teams annually in prior environment Composite 192 192 192
D3 Hours of daily 20-minute scrums for agile delivery resources annually in prior environment Composite 79 79 79
D4 Total hours in agile ceremonies per resource annually D2+D3 271 271 271
D5 Time savings for agile ceremonies with Lucid Interviews 10% 20% 30%
D6 Agile ceremony efficiencies with Lucid per licensed user D4*D5 27 54 81
D7 Number of technical resources using Lucid to facilitate agile delivery Composite 330 670 1,00
D8 Average fully burdened salary of a technical resource TEI standard $64 $64 $64
D9 Subtotal: Efficiencies for technical agile delivery teams D6*D7*D8 $570,240 $2,315,520 $5,184,000
D10 Number of nontechnical resources using Lucid to facilitate agile delivery Composite 0 350 700
D11 Average fully burdened salary of a nontechnical resource on an agile delivery team TEI standard $50 $50 $50
D12 Subtotal: Efficiencies for nontechnical agile delivery teams D6*D10*D11 $0 $945,000 $2,835,000
D13 Total standup meeting efficiencies for all agile teams D9+D12 $570,240 $3,260,520 $8,019,000
D14 Productivity recapture rate Composite 50% 50% 50%
Dt Agile delivery teams efficiencies D1*D13*D14 $94,090 $1,092,274 $4,009,500
Risk adjustment ↓20%
Dtr Agile delivery team efficiencies (risk- adjusted) $75,272 $873,819 $3,207,600
Three-year total: $4,156,691 Three-year present value: $3,200,511

Onboarding Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees pointed to ways in which Lucid Suite impacted the pace of onboarding technical resources at their organizations.

  • The senior director in the software industry said their organization’s teams made several new hires following the Lucid deployment, and they reported significant efficiencies during the onboarding process. They said: “We more than doubled the capacity across all of my teams last year. Before, onboarding was probably around 12 weeks. As of now with the Lucid Suite, two weeks is the average [and] four at worst case. We have had 15 resources who have come on faster [and] quickly [got] up to speed on all the work that we’ve done [...and are] planning.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry similarly observed that the increased productivity the Lucid Suite enabled their organization extended to onboarding efficiencies.

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite saves on onboarding technical resources by decreasing the time it takes for new hires to start being productive.
  • The composite decommissions 33% of its legacy collaboration tech stack in Year 1, with 67% decommissioned in Year 2. By the end of the three-year period, the composite organization fully decommissions all of its legacy collaboration tools and declares the Lucid Suite as its organizationwide visual collaboration solution.
  • With 15% churn on technical teams, the composite organization recruits 50 new hires in Year 1, 101 in Year 2, and 150 in Year 3.
  • Prior to using the Lucid Suite, the composite’s onboarding period for new hires on technical teams working in agile averaged 12 weeks (or 480 hours).
  • As the composite ramps up use of the Lucid Suite across technical teams, the time to onboard new hires decreases by 20% in Year 1, by 50% in Year 2, and by 65% by Year 3.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the benefit will vary between organizations depending on the frequency of onboarding new employees virtually. In a hybrid work environment, an organization has more choice regarding whether it onboards employees virtually or in person. An organization that chooses to onboard employees in person may not use Lucid as often during those sessions.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.4 million.

Faster onboarding of new hires

65%

Hours saved with faster onboarding

76,000

Onboarding Savings

Ref. Metric Source Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
E1 Legacy decommissioning rate A1 33% 67% 100%
E2 Number of new hires for technical teams working in agile D7*15% 50 101 150
E3 Hours to onboard new hires for technical teams working in agile in the prior environment Composite 480 480 480
E4 Percent reduction in hours to onboard new hires for technical teams working in agile with Lucid Interviews 20% 50% 65%
E5 Onboarding hours saved per technical resource with Lucid E3*E4 96 240 312
E6 Total hours saved onboarding new technical resources E2*E5 4,800 24,240 46,800
E7 Average fully burdened salary of a technical resource TEI standard $64 $64 $64
E8 Productivity capture rate Composite 50% 50% 50%
Et Onboarding savings E1*E6*E7*E8 $50,688 $519,706 $1,497,600
Risk adjustment ↓10%
Etr Onboarding savings (risk-adjusted) $45,619 $467,735 $1,347,840
Three-year total: $1,861,195 Three-year present value: $1,440,682

“The ability to go remote and outside of our headquarters' geographic area was huge. We can now go to wherever the right candidate happens to be and bring them on versus being limited to our region”

Senior manager, insurance

“We have had a really good onboarding experience in my portion of the [organization] ultimately because of Lucid. [After] one sprint, most of the [new hires] will be up to speed on project.”

Senior director, software

Unquantified Benefits

Additional benefits that customers experienced but were not able to quantify include:

Improved SLAs and availability. The senior director in the software industry shared how streamlining asynchronous collaboration with the Lucid Suite helped their team increase dependability and improve cadence. They said: “My teams have a very high level of accountability for our work. Prior to [using] the Lucid Suite, on average, we were probably delivering around 75% of our quarterly objectives. Now, the quarterly objectives within our control are about 98%. Because of our consistency and, ultimately, everything that we build has a downstream customer that’s dependent on it, our ability to be dependable means that they don’t miss on their OKRs.”

The director continued: “My [organization’s] infrastructure security team handles all of the log flows with Lucidchart. We’re onboarding new systems at a regular cadence. Our detection team needs to depend on when those things are going to show up because they need to build their detection and machine-learning models on top of that data. And, so, if we are not predictable, they can’t predict when they’re able to deliver those things. And, ultimately, their ability to deliver has an even bigger impact. It’s exponential with each team that enriches the data.”

Streamlined M&A, and new revenue streams. When discussing how their organizations have been able to generate revenue using the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite, interviewees recounted gaining the ability to open new revenue streams and streamline M&A activities.

  • The senior director in the software industry shared how the Lucid Suite helped their organization fulfil its goal to get FedRAMP authorized, which gave it the ability to sell its software to the government market. The director said: “We have federal customers that [couldn’t] use us until we achieved FedRAMP certification at different levels. We had started on it, but we didn’t have the capacity we needed to build it. When we actually did it and achieved [FedRAMP authorization], Lucidchart was definitely a principal system that we used for our architectures being able to consolidate all of the cross-organization and cross-team collaboration, which was a necessity to get those things done.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry described how the Lucid Suite facilitated M&A, especially when the subsidiary already had the Lucid Suite. They said: “We are practically on an M&A buying spree. We bought about 10 companies in the last eight months, and a lot of these companies already had the Lucid Suite. I just moved their tenants into ours, and they have all the old stuff right there in the same system they’d been using.”

Reduced technical debt. Interviewees described how the Lucid Suite helped their organizations identify existing technical debt and mitigate the accumulation of further technical debt.

  • Regarding the Lucid Suite’s impact on technical debt, the senior director in the software industry shared: “[The Lucid Suite] helps indirectly with our planning process. We do look at our backlog regularly, especially at ... the end of the quarter when we’re planning our next quarter. That gave us the ability to focus on our technical debt early and [to] try to keep it under maintenance.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry described how technical debt manifested in their organization. They said: “It definitely matters to our organization where everyone’s always trying to reduce technical debt. We had somebody who recently redid our CMDB (configuration management database), and they started with Lucidchart [and mapped out] all the systems. I think the visual component is helping people see things better.”

Improved user experience with better insights on usage (e.g., inclusion, tool adoption). Interviewees reported high levels of user satisfaction around having better insights on usage than other collaboration tools their organizations used.

  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry shared: “Our measure of productivity is more of the satisfaction score of the people rating the platforms that they’re using. From the user-experience side, the Lucid Suite received a higher customer satisfaction rating than other platforms.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry said: “The feedback I get from the people using [the Lucid Suite] is always overwhelmingly positive.”

Quality of output. Many interviewees noted how the quality of output — regardless of user or use case — improved by using the Lucid Suite’s visual- collaboration applications.

  • The vice president in the financial services industry described the quality of insights and output produced with the Lucid Suite. They said: “You can make really good presentations, swim lanes, and network diagrams, but it really expands to a lot more. Whenever I give this product to someone, they always come back and say: ‘It’s easy to use. I am able to present my ideas in a much more consumable fashion, and my presentations look better.’ So much of the feedback around Lucidchart specifically is about how easy it is to put something together and how great it looks. It makes it easy to make slides with a lot of information from Lucidchart, and it looks very good with each other. It flows very well.”
  • The senior director in the software industry noted quality of output: “Lucidchart is 100% making a difference in our diagramming and architecture. Not only are they more in depth, but they’re easier to read.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry said: “You’re getting more detail on the things that wouldn’t necessarily fit in a visual [prior to using Lucidchart]. We have large amounts of other data that we need to collect about an individual application, how it’s set up, and who’s working on it.”

Vendor quality. Several interviewees indicated that Lucid provided a high-quality vendor engagement. In particular, the senior director in the software industry noted: “[Lucid’s] sales team, customer-success team, account executives, [and] everyone I’ve worked with at Lucid has been spectacular. They’re always offering trainings or wanting to get new people up to speed on the products and how to use them. I wish all of our vendors were at the same level as Lucid.”

“[In our surveys,] people write things, '[the Lucid Suite] has made job so much easier. I've been able to get meetings done more effectively in less time.”

Technology strategy manager, financial services

“The Lucid Suite is definitely one of the best platforms. It's really easy to use, and it makes everything look great.”

Vice president, financial services

Breadth of security and compliance controls. Several interviewees reported that the Lucid Suite’s security features better positioned their organizations’ security and compliance postures.

  • The senior director in the software industry described the built-in security features their organization found valuable with the Lucid Suite. They said: “Lucid has a huge impact from a security perspective. [The ability] to see what matches the asset-identification tool ... is something that an architecture diagram does not show. Between those two tools, we have a very good understanding of our cloud infrastructure. ... All of the audits and authorizations we achieve over the years apply directly to revenue streams. We can’t process PCI data until we have a PCI certification. Once we achieve that, we unblock all of the fintech companies that want to use us for credit-card processing.”
  • The director continued: “We leverage a lot of the Lucid Suite’s RBAC (role-based account control), and the integration with SSO (single sign-on). If somebody leaves to pursue a different job opportunity, we get to maintain it at the SSO level and know that the documents are still protected.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry shared: “I still need to protect my company’s data. With SSO, we have the Lucid Suite connected to our network. So, when somebody starts, they have access to it., and when they leave, they lose access to it. In a cloud environment, to me, that was a big deal and [it] was part of our problem.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry described how the Lucid Suite helped improve their organization’s auditing posture. They said: “Our biggest risks were around data protection, and we really had to make sure that our data is secure in transit and secure [in] rest and all that other good stuff. We’re heavy in the UK, so GDPR is a big thing for us, too. And we have to be compliant with things like security background, stock, [and] financial background. Lucid has a good cloud platform that we’ve audited, and we feel comfortable with it.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement the Lucid Suite and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

Balanced workloads. The senior manager in the insurance industry shared how their organization may be positioned to rebalance its culture with less reliance on contractors as collaboration improves. They said: “Time will prove it out, but we have a massive imbalance between full-time employees and contractors. We are able to .. do more or the same with less.”

Benefits from organizational culture shift to remote work and collaboration. Interviewees said that because the Lucid Suite enables remote collaboration, their organizations benefited from adjusting to a remote-work business model.

  • The senior manager in the insurance industry said their organization was able to recruit better talent with a remote workforce. They said: “We [have attracted] higher-qualified candidates and a better workforce. [It’s] absolutely, qualitatively better. It does help us to be able to accomplish part of our transformation, which is to bring better value to our customers and our business.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry described how the Lucid Suite enabled hybrid work at their organization. They said: “It’s getting people more into the hybrid work model and getting people working collaboratively across offices. I can see that driving a lot more productivity across the board.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).

Total Costs

Ref. Costs Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total Present Value
Ftr Lucid Suite fees $0 $107,730 $267,120 $424,200 $799,050 $637,404
Gtr Deployment, training, and change management $1,690 $201,379 $449,415 $691,308 $1,343,792 $1,075,569
Htr Administration and enablement $0 $97,463 $277,994 $455,186 $830,643 $660,338
Total costs (risk-adjusted) $1,690 $406,572 $994,529 $1,570,694 $2,973,485 $2,373,311

Lucid Suite Fees

Evidence and data. Interviewees described an organic and rapid adoption of the Lucid Suite across their organizations, and some said their firms paid fees to Lucid for professional services.

  • Two interviewees also said their organizations paid professional services fees to Lucid. The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry reported that their organization engaged a consultant from Lucid for $60,000. And the manager of IT governance in the biotech industry also said their organization incurred some professional services fees from Lucid during the first year of deployment before transitioning employees to regular, internally run enablement sessions (see Cost H).
  • The senior manager in the insurance industry shared that their organization’s initial approach to licenses was to preserve them for individuals who actively took part in their firm’s workshops. They shared: “Users didn’t want us to take [their license] away and give it to another person. They wanted to keep it. So, we very quickly consumed the 200 licenses, and it started to grow. And now, teams have started to use it outside of what we’re doing within DevOps.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry noted, “[My organization’s adoption of Lucid Suite] was very informal, but it really took off. It went from a handful of users to thousands.”

“Our Lucid Suite license growth is [practically] geometric. As soon as someone see it, they want a license.”

Agile coach, fintech

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite pays subscription fees for fully licensed users of Lucidchart, and use of Lucidspark ramps up over time as the organization increasingly adopts the toolset.
  • The composite organization pays $30,000 per year for Lucid professional services during the three-year investment period.
  • Pricing may vary; contact Lucid for details.

Risks. License costs for the Lucid Suite depend on the total number of fully enabled users. Professional service fees may vary year-over-year.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit upward by 5%, yielding a three- year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $637,000.

Lucid Suite Fes

Ref. Metric Source Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
F1 Lucid Suite subscription fees Composite $0 $72,600 $224,400 $374,000
F2 Professional services fees Composite $0 $30,000 $30,000 $30,000
Ft Lucid Suite fees F1+F2 $0 $102,600 $254,400 $404,000
Risk adjustment ↑5%
Ftr Lucid Suite fees (risk-adjusted) $0 $107,730 $267,120 $424,200
Three-year total: $799,050 Three-year present value: $637,404

Deployment, Training, And Change Management

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations incurred internal costs to deploy and adopt the Lucid Suite, sometimes as part of broader change-management initiatives, including:

Deployment. Interviewees cited a range of efforts to deploy the Lucid Suite across their organizations depending on their prior environments.

  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry said their organization used an intentional process to vet, select, and securely deploy an enterprisewide visual collaboration tool. They shared: “The Lucid Suite came to the organization [after a] breach. After that breach, everything became super hard to get through the approval process because there were a lot of new controls [and] new checks and balances that were added to the process. The Lucid Suite came across as one of the most secure in terms of controls [and] compliance, and we have a very heavy-handed cyber-ISO and a legal [process with a] very extensive IA (information assessment).”
  • The interviewee also described a detailed comparative analysis for all of the whiteboarding capabilities their organization used. They said: “We did a feature analysis [and] a security analysis, and [we] ran multiple pilots with an extensive, three-month-long initiative with complete discovery across the tools.”
  • The vice president in the financial services industry also said their organization’s deployment of the Lucid Suite was swift and that the most lift was around security protocols. They said: “It gets deployed pretty quickly. It took about six months from the first time we started talking to getting that fully integrated, but it didn’t take developers or engineers [to deploy]. It just took a lot of security people for approvals. The setup was really not that hard.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry noted that their organization deployed the Lucid Suite during a one-month period. They said: “We had the support of Lucid to get it set up. It didn’t take us lots of time because it was just [a matter of] putting it on our SSO and making sure it’s [secure].

Training Interviewees said their organizations required easy-to-use collaboration tools, and they cited modest training costs with Lucid.

  • The technology strategy manager in the financial services industry said: “[Lucid has] good training material like online videos so that we don’t spend time training people. It should be very intuitive ... and ... if people need help, there are self-help tutorials that are going to be available that people can go through.”
  • Regarding training costs, the senior manager in the insurance industry shared: “We’ve spent some time training — about an hour’s worth of time to demo it and such. But the adoption was very, very fast. So, I wouldn’t say there [are] a lot of costs there.”
  • The manager of IT governance in the biotech industry indicated that their organization completed its first deployment of the Lucid Suite in one month. They shared: “[Lucid] gave us a lot of training, and I think I’ve spent a total of $1,000 to do two sessions with them that we recorded and can use over again. Technically, [licensed users] can get two hours of training.

“A lot of Lucid's free training is very good.”

Manager of IT governance, biotech

Change management. Interviewees’ organizations varied in their change management efforts. The vice president in the financial services industry said change-management procedures coming from a post-breach environment impacted their firm’s deployment. They said: “We had to change. We had to train everybody to handle their work differently. Instead of keeping files on your computer, you keep your files in the Lucid Suite or the cloud.”

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • During the initial one-month deployment period, the composite organization dedicates 24 hours to technical implementation. During each of the following three years of product expansion, the composite devotes an additional 6 hours to technical implementation.
  • The composite dedicates 4 hours to security review during the initial deployment and another 2 hours per year to ensure security of the product as the organization scales its use.
  • Training and change-management costs support the composite organization’s organic shift toward becoming a digital-first, future-fit organization.
  • Fully licensed users including newly hired resources receive a structured training and change-management program at a cost of $150 per licensed user.
  • Collaboration end users with read-only privileges receive 1 hour of change-management and training at an average cost of $43.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the cost will vary between organizations depending on the following factors:

  • The scale of the organization’s deployment of the Lucid Suite, which will vary in the level of broader change management that occurs alongside the deployment and the level of security protocols that accompany cloud deployments.
  • Whether teams invest more or less time and resources in the planning and deployment process.
  • The level of training and change management, which will vary based on a user’s familiarity with visual-collaboration tools.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit upward by 10%, yielding a three- year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1 million.

Deployment, Training, And Change Management

Ref. Metric Source Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
G1 Hours of technical implementation Composite 20 6 6 6
G2 Hours of security review Interviews 4 2 2 2
G3 Average fully burdened hourly salary of a technical or security resource TEI standard $64 $64 $64 $64
G4 Subtotal: Deployment costs (G1+G2)*G3 $1,536 $512 $512 $512
G5 Full users trained and involved in change management, including churn D7+D10+E2 0 380 1,121 1,850
G6 Training and change-management costs per full user Composite $150 $150 $150 $150
G7 Number of FTEs (read-only users) who use Lucid for virtual collaboration B3-G5 0 2,920 5,579 8,150
G8 Training and change-management costs per read-only user B7 $43 $43 $43 $43
G9 Subtotal: Training and change management (G5*G6)+(G7*G8) $0 $182,560 $408,047 $627,950
Gt Deployment, training, and change management G4+G9 $1,536 $183,072 $408,559 $628,462
Risk adjustment ↑10%
Gtr Deployment, training, and change management (risk-adjusted) $1,690 $201,379 $449,415 $691,308
Three-year total: $1,343,792 Three-year present value: $1,075,569

Administration And Enablement

Evidence and data. Interviewees said their organizations incurred additional costs to manage the Lucid Suite tools and ensure tool enablement across their organizations.

  • Product administration. Interviewees said their organizations required minimal time to manage and administer the Lucid Suite. The agile coach in the fintech industry noted that their team meets with representatives from Lucid every two weeks.

  • Product enablement. Some interviewees said that to optimize the Lucid Suite adoption to the range of use cases it can serve, their organizations held regular sessions around product enablement. In particular, the senior manager in the insurance industry said their organization conducted monthly, hourlong community-of-practice meetings to promote use of the platform.

Modeling and assumptions. Forester assumes the following about the composite organization:

  • The composite devotes 30 minutes per month to ongoing administration of the Lucid Suite.
  • One-third of the composite’s fully licensed users participate in community-of-practice meetings to encourage adoption, enablement, and to expand use of the Lucid Suite and use cases for it.
  • Participants from technical teams in enablement sessions earn an average fully burdened hourly salary of $64.
  • Participants from nontechnical teams earn an average fully burdened hourly salary of $50.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences, and the cost will vary between organizations depending on how much time and how many resources that teams invest in the administration and enablement of the Lucid Suite.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit upward by 15%, yielding a three- year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $660,000.

Administration And Enablement

Ref. Metric Source Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
H1 Lucid Suite ongoing administration Interviews 0 6 6 6
H2 Fully burdened hourly salary of a Lucid Suite administrator Composite $45 $45 $45 $45
H3 Subtotal: Lucid Suite administration cost H1*H2 $0 $270 $270 $270
H4 Hours of community practice meetings per year Interviews 0 12 12 12
H5 Technical resources attending community practice meetings (rounded) D7/3 0 110 223 333
H6 Average fully burdened hourly salary of a technical resource at a community practice meeting (rounded) D8 $64 $64 $64 $64
H7 Nontechnical resources who attend community practice meetings (rounded) D10/3 0 0 117 233
H8 Average fully burdened salary of a nontechnical resource at a community practice meeting (rounded) D11 $50 $50 $50 $50
H9 Subtotal: Lucid Suite enablement (H4*H5*H6)+(H4*H7*H8) $0 $84,480 $241,464 $395,544
Ht Administration and enablement H3+H9 $0 $84,750 $241,734 $395,814
Risk adjustment ↑15%
Htr Administration and enablement (risk-adjusted) $0 $97,463 $277,994 $455,186
Three-year total: $830,643 Three-year present value: $660,338

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    These risk-adjusted ROI, NPV, and payback period values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each benefit and cost section.

Cash Flow Chart

Total costs Total benefits Cumulative net benefits

Cash Flow Table (Risk-Adjusted)

Initial Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Total Present Value
Total Costs ($1,690) ($406,572) ($994,529) ($1,570,694) ($2,973,485) ($2,373,311)
Total Benefits $0 $576,154 $3,699,749 $11,337,365 $15,613,268 $12,099,350
Net Benefits ($1,690) $169,582 $2,705,220 $9,766,671 $12,639,783 $9,726,039
ROI 410%
Payback Period <6 months

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

Appendix A: Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

Total Economic Impact Approach

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    Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.

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    Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.

  • icon

    Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.

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    Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”

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    PRESENT VALUE (PV)

    The present or current value of (discounted) cost and benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate). The PV of costs and benefits feed into the total NPV of cash flows.

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    NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)

    The present or current value of (discounted) future net cash flows given an interest rate (the discount rate). A positive project NPV normally indicates that the investment should be made, unless other projects have higher NPVs.

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    RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

    A project’s expected return in percentage terms. ROI is calculated by dividing net benefits (benefits less costs) by costs.

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    DISCOUNT RATE

    The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.

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    PAYBACK PERIOD

    The breakeven point for an investment. This is the point in time at which net benefits (benefits minus costs) equal initial investment or cost.

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

Appendix B: Endnotes

1 Source: “Optimize Your Cloud Organization For Speed And Customer Delight,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 13th, 2022.

2 Source: “The Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 16th, 2023.

3 Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

About Forrester Consulting

Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester’s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit forrester.com/consulting.

Forrester Research, Inc.© All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to forrester.com.

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