How can pilot programs help you successfully implement change?

🤔 How can pilot programs help you manage change effectively? Pilot program are a great way to test a solution before it goes live and it’s permanent. Think of it like a soft opening of a store. You can test a solution with a handful of employees and or clients to see how well it works and how they respond to before you decide on a full deployment. The feedback you get can help you make improvements and changes before the final release. Your stakeholders, both external and internal, will appreciate you seeking their feedback before implementing changes that effect them. Pilot programs can be your best friend when it comes to change management and set you and your solution up for success! 👍 Like to support this

Pilot programs serve as experimental runs to assess the viability and effectiveness of a change initiative before its organization-wide implementation. You initiate them to minimize risk and refine your strategy based on real-world data and feedback, allowing for improved stakeholder buy-in. To deploy a pilot program successfully, it's crucial to have a clear scope, a well-designed plan, effective execution, and comprehensive evaluation to gauge outcomes against expectations. Post-evaluation, the insights gained assist in fine-tuning the broader change initiative, ensuring a smoother rollout with continuous monitoring and refinement as necessary.

Pilots are especially effective in change resistant cultures. It allows key stakeholders to get bought-in as they’re part of a solution design. This is a great way for resistors to become advocates. In my experience, inviting them to partner with you on a pilot project provides the best chance of a smoother roll out, the feedback you’ll receive will be critical on all levels, but it will provide an end product that fits to the organizational needs. The results can be shared to the bigger organizational roll out and if successful can be used to amplify the case for change.

I would add that piloting always requires a focus and limitation. This limitation typically regards time, people or system complexity - or a combination of these aspects. In more detail: 1) Pilots may run for a limited time to learn for future implementation. 2) It may also include a limited share of the target audience, to learn for rolling out the change to the full group subsequently. 3) A pilot could also focus on a particular sub-set of functionalities or aspects out of a bigger or more complex construct.

Pilot launch is essential to organization as a trial to test the success of a product or process deployment prior to commercialization. As correctly said, a pilot program helps the project team to analyze the outcome in a limited and a controlled environment for increased buy-in, reduce uncertainty and also to take corrective measure for changes or improvements. A pilot program demonstrates the value of a product, process or a solution and is often referred to as 'seeing is believing'. This is more often applied in transformation initiatives, radical changes to processes, new product development and when adopting new technologies such as Blockchain and RPA etc.

As mentioned before - I would define a pilot a little wider than just focusing on a limited target group. Consequently the key step here is do define the scope for the pilot - so regarding time, people and (system) complexity aspects.

One thing that i have always found useful was to link the objectives into quantitative measures in improvement projects and to analyze pilot data against the objectives. Mostly ground staff was engaged in pilots for increased success and quality feedback. Engaging customers with focus groups are helpful when proposing new products, changing customer facing processes or technology solutions. I always define the need of a pilot at the initail stage when seeting up the project charter and is upfront communicated with a project plan. Using effective and appropriate locations, target markets have always been useful in the past to receive sufficient volume or inputs (depending on the type of project and the audience) to determine success.

Always build margin into your execution plans. Tasks take longer than expected, people go out on PTO. Build in added time for questions, discussions about roles and prospective impact. It’s easy to assume that people know these things. They typically don’t. It’s important to have a single point of responsibility for the execution plan. Someone capable (who ideally has done thus before) and who has the authority to delegate and call audibles when needed.

Evaluating a pilot program's success involves more than just a cursory review of metrics and stakeholder feedback. As an expert in change management, consider implementing advanced techniques like Return on Investment (ROI) analyses and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to gauge stakeholder satisfaction and financial impact. Benchmark against industry best practices and competitors to contextualize your findings. Utilize A/B testing methods to directly compare the new change against existing processes. Don't just report findings; offer actionable recommendations that are supported by data. Where possible, quantify the change in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to strategic goals.

I have always used data analytics, hypothesis tests and feedback sessions to understand the success or required corrective measures. These are presented to the process or business owners for an effective decision making process.

Based on previous projects, I have seen great results when working together with ambassadors. They provide isights into their departments as well share progress that has been made within their team and outside of it. Try it next time, you can only win.

One of the key important factors i have observed in the past was the level of engagement by the critical stakeholders of the process. Key stakeholders such as process or business owners, customers and other stakeholders with greater interest should be not only be involved but also contribute to the pilot. This helps a pilot program be collaborative for refinements and commercialization.

We have usually established a dedicated task force. By organising regular Face-to-Face Workshops, obstacles have been tackled or were escalated. This way, we have been able to maintain a normal risk management.

Imagine convincing your pet goldfish, Gary, to upgrade from his old fishbowl to a fancy new tank with a pirate ship and treasure chest. You can't just toss him in and hope for the best, right? That's where pilot programs come in. They're like a test swim for Gary, a chance to dip his fins into the new world before diving in fully. So, before you introduce a big change, think of it as ensuring Gary's happiness in his pirate paradise – a small-scale trial to avoid fishy meltdowns!

Organization culture and change maturity will have to be considered before even trying. If agile has been introduced and accepted then this should be considered.

I have often crafted pilot programs with large organizations in collaborative projects. We planned several sessions with 100 to 150 managers and the first one aimed at refining the program if necessary. I always schedule a retrospective after each colloborative session and at the end of the assignment: the retrospective after the pilot session gives the client a chance to evaluate what happened and to raise the bar for the continution of the program.