Pilot Plan
Photo by UK Ministry of Defence

What is a Pilot?

A pilot is an experimental or preliminary trial or test of your solution on a limited scale. A Pilot plan is the best way to ensure your pilot run is successful.

Why Pilot?

  • Lower Risk
    • Lowers risk of failure by limiting resource usage.
    • Assess true performance in controlled-but-live experiments.
  • Learn
    • Confirm or disprove expected results and relationships.
    • To test and validate the benefit of the proposed solutions before rollout.
    • Validate your measurement system.
  • Improve Solution
    • Identify additional improvements in either the solution or implementation launch itself.
    • Improve future projections of the benefits of a full rollout.
  • Stakeholder Relations
    • Increase stakeholder buy-in.
    • Quickly deliver a version of the solution to a targeted segment of the client population.

When should you Pilot?

  • When you want any of the benefits covered in Why.
  • The scope is very large, and the price of full rollout failure is large.
  • The solution could have far-reaching or unintended consequences.
  • The solution is difficult or impossible to reverse.

Traits of a Pilot

  • Small scale
  • Reversible
  • Designed to incrementally increased-employee involvement
  • Utilize simulations – simulate process improvement using mathematical or computer-based modeling

Design the Pilot Plan

Similar to the Define phase of DMAIC – what are you trying to do? What do you hope to achieve? What is the definition of success? How are you going to get there? Who is impacted? To whom do you need help from?

What are the 3 keys aspects to a successful pilot? Plan, monitor, evaluate.

Pilot Plan

  • Plan Pilot Purpose & Goals
    • Define what needs to be piloted/implemented.
    • Good idea to reference the Project Charter, especially the Project Benefits & Objectives. Will your pilot be able to demonstrate that achieving these is possible?
  • Pilot Scope
    • Prioritization matrices can be used to narrow down the team’s focus before detailed implementation planning can happen.
    • What is the size or boundaries of what will be measured?
    • How will you ensure the pilot is as realistic as possible?
    • Identify when & where pilots will be run.
  • Timeline
  • Activities List
  • Clearly articulate the steps & tasks necessary to test the proposed solutions.
    • Action
    • Owner
    • Process it Affects
    • Schedule
  • Determine how pilots will be conducted and the length of time
    • Pilots should be run for as long as it takes to understand whether the process is stable.
  • Determine result tracking needs.
  • Useful tools.
  • Budget and Resources Required
  • Identify team members, equipment, and material to be used.
  • Plan appropriate training and communications for the pilot.
    • Documentation Required
  • Monitoring plan and operational definitions of measurements to collect and goals to be met.
  • How will you evaluate results?
    • Contingency Plans
  • How will you monitor and deal with issues during the pilot?
    • Ex. Minimize disruptions

Run the Pilot

  • Collect data on internal and external factors that may be influencing the process.
  • Expose the pilot to as broad of a range of inputs and process conditions as possible.

After the Pilot

  • Collect and Evaluate Pilot Results.
    • Analyze the gaps between the predicted performance and the actual performance.
  • Root cause of the gaps to determine why and if you need to change the solutions.
  • Analyze the pilot plan. What worked? What didn’t? What did you add or change?
    • Communicate Pilot Results
  • Create a summary of the strategy used to pilot the solution and communicate the results achieved.
    • Solicit Stakeholder Feedback:
  • Change management is a key part of project success. Soliciting feedback during stakeholder interviews gives you access to thoughts from those impacted by the project.
  • Review the original stakeholder analysis to determine how/if anything has changed and what you may want to do to address those results.

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Comments (12)

Thoko, The risk is that you are betting your improvement is 100% correct. By having a pilot to a restricted or smaller group, you can work out the kinks and any issues before full roll out of the changes. Think of it as incremental validation.

Mitshen,

A pilot plan is chiefly used to mitigate risk. I’m not sure what SSO means (Single Sign on?).

Perhaps try to create a FMEA and then let that help you follow the steps listed above and go from there.

Best, Ted

Great Article. I’m working on pilot and have to measure Time on Motion now. I realise the business has no Pilot Plan. I now have to work on producing one.

‘Expose the pilot to as broad of a range of inputs and process conditions as possible.’

Please can you expatiate on this a little?

Also do you have a template, please?

Also,

Hi Natiya,

Since the purpose of a pilot plan is largely to mitigate risk, I like to ensure that I cover the scenarios that will let me learn the most.

Since there are infinitely different projects and thus possible pilot plans, it’s not possible for me to give you a template. But I can explain some of the ways I go about thinking here.

For one, pilot plans are usually governed by cost, schedule, and scope. How much are you able to spend in hard $, time, or effort to prove what you need to in a pilot?

In most cases I try to pilot something that helps me feel good about the most common or ‘happy path’. Another way to think of this would be to Pareto out the most common configurations and choose one sample for each.

If resources allow, I also like to test boundary conditions. In many projects or implementations you’re trying to solve a specific problem. And at this point you probably feel pretty good that your solution will fit. But there are edges where you’re not sure your solution will fit. I like to try to pilot those edge cases so I get a sense where on the continuum the solution will fit perfectly, where it fits with some adjustments, and where it absolutely doesn’t fit at all.

Best, Ted.

Hi James,

I don’t mean to be flippant here, but at these are vastly different concepts. I want to help you but I also don’t want to be doing homework questions for other people. Let’s try this; What do you see as similar between Design of Experiments and Pilot tests? Answer that and we can discuss the how and why of the differences.

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