"Teflon Pilots" -- Pilots That Don't Stick

The normal approach I've seen applied to pilots is based on software products, not custom-built solutions. The ones I have been privy to have often been vendor-initiated as it turns out. A software product-centric Pilot is fundamentally different from the Flintstones approach.

By definition, a product-based Pilot is, well, software product first. It starts with a completed product and attempts to fit this into the lives of a small group of users. This immediately creates a whole bunch of work to figure out how the product works and only then do we begin to map the product into the daily life of the users.

Then comes the hard work of tailoring the solution to fit the needs of the Pilot group, which for the projects I have observed has been no less than the amount of effort and analysis as would have been required for a full product implementation. It's just difficult to implement a product on a small scale.

Although it is not necessary, in practice this kicks off a bunch of traditional IT behaviours. First, there is a tendency to consider all of the edge cases not necessary for the Pilot group. And secondly, there is a tendency to want to integrate the solution into other systems even though this could be dealt with as a temporary Pilot.

All of these additional activities lead to 2 outcomes: