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The Four Benefits of a Pilot Program
The Four Benefits of a Pilot Program
by Lenka Davis
Good companies take calculated risks, by that I mean that they go into an untapped market or test a new product with a pilot program. It's a risk to go into uncharted territory, but it needs to be calculated because you have to decide which measurements to watch in order to know if it is a success or not. A pilot program is one that is smaller in scale and has metrics associated with it so the team can decide if this is something that they should continue to invest in and grow.
Definition of a calculated risk - a hazard or chance of failure whose degree of probability has been reckoned or estimated before some undertaking is entered upon
Definition of a pilot program - A pilot program, also called a feasibility study or experimental trial, is a small-scale, short-term experiment that helps an organization learn how a large-scale project might work in practice.
Pilot testing vs beta testing
A pilot program is not a beta program. Pilot testing is done before the release of a product, and beta testing is done after the release of a product. The purpose of a pilot test is to find out if you have a good product that will fit the market. The beta program is a roll out of a product into the market itself where you have more confidence it will be used and adopted.
Definition of a beta test - a field test of the beta version of a product (such as software) especially by testers outside the company developing it that is conducted prior to commercial release. The first known use of this term was in 1983.
Benefits
You have less risk because you are launching a test of a service or product on a much smaller scale to find out if it will work.
You spend less time and less of your budget to see if something will work
You can take what you learn from a pilot program and make edits to it and then do a full scale launch
Lower risk → financially and address problems sooner
A pilot program is done with one customer or a small set of similar customers so you can get real-time feedback. That feedback can then be added into the product for a smoother and bigger launch.
And you have verification that there is really a use for what you are offering
Validation → from feedback and real customer demand
You can dedicate a team of resources to the pilot program that gains deep knowledge about how everything is going with the test users and the offerings.
This team will then report out metrics and do analysis. They may even have aha-moments about how customers are using the product. They will have reports on what was expected to be tracked with the data but then will have insights that were unexpected.
Analytics → from data that is explicit and implicit
Confidence will build with the investors, the team and any other stakeholders.
Learning from the pilot will make the product better suited for the next set of customers.
Confidence → built up confidence from everyone involved
How to do pilot project planning
List out all the steps that the team needs to take
Assign those steps to one responsible person within a department
Departments such as the marketing team, the IT department, and the customer service department.
List the system or format that step will exist in, for example is it a deliverable or some activity in a system, etc.
Decide on what success criteria there will be for the pilot program. If there are analytics to be tracked, set up the process to track them.
Fun Fact
The public school system in Tacoma, Washington created an EPMO department (enterprise project management office) so they could transform their learning environment. As they were getting up and running they did two pilot projects. One to allow students to conduct social and emotional self-check-ins via a personal online dashboard tracking it from kindergarten through grade 12. And another that launched technology into three schools, which included deploying tablets to support differentiated learning, 3D printers and flat-panel systems. One of the most staggering measures of success of the whole department was “Graduation rates have increased from 55 percent in 2010 to 86 percent in 2016, which exceeds the state average.”
Resources
Chasing Innovation Test Projects
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