The Power of Starting Small to Gain Support and Traction
How iterations can help you out
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Change aversion is one of the biggest enemies of innovation.
As humans, we don’t like change. We do like feeling safe.
Anything things that makes things different than what we’re used to will make many people uncomfortable.
In any organization, around 15-20% of people will be excited about changes, while 20-30% will be resistant; the remaining will take a watch-and-see approach.
How do you innovate in a scenario like this?
Different strategies can benefit you, but a well-proven one is a pilot project. Let’s discuss it.
What’s a pilot project?
A pilot project is a way of testing something new before deciding upon further investment. Instead of making an entire upfront investment, the pilot project aims to test something on a reduced scale to assess whether it works. When it works, the organization can expand the project; when it doesn’t, it can cut costs.
Some people confuse a pilot project with a proof of concept (POC). They are different. A pilot project represents a real-world scenario, while a POC evaluates whether the team can achieve specific goals. However, it doesn’t mean being operational with a reduced sample.
Pilot projects are helpful to drive change because they aim to start small. When it works well, it’s easy to scale up. Here are a few examples:
Changing how teams work: If you try deploying Scrum to 100 teams, you will face loads of resistance, but you can gain support by deploying it to 5 teams and measuring results.
Operational change: In manufacturing, pilot projects evaluate whether a new method is worth the investment before adapting the assembly line.
A real-world example of a pilot project
A few years ago, I worked for an automaker, and one of our struggles was keeping the inventory accurate. We often had problems with missing spare parts. Worse, everyone knew the root cause: manual work.
We had a system in which whenever someone grabbed a part from the inventory, the person dropped the label in a box. Later, another operator would collect and read the labels, and the system would update the inventory. There were too many failure points in a single process, but changing it entirely would impact hundreds of people, and nobody wanted such a challenge.
That changed once a smart engineer reimagined how we calculate the inventory. She said, “What if instead of dropping the label in a box, the operator goes through a kind of portal, which automatically reads the labels and sends it to our servers, and voi-là?”
Such an imagination inspired everyone to try it out, but we had people against it as many uncertainties were before us. Setting up a pilot project enabled us to stop talking about the work and start doing it.
We calculated our investment to change 10% of our operations, explore a new solution, and prove we can reduce inventory mistakes from 10% to 1%. We asked for two months of development time and one month running the pilot.
After getting the greenlights, we explored different solutions and found our way with RFID tags. Within six weeks, we had something to start our pilot. Although our first and second attempts failed, we learned about the issues and could correct the course. Then, we put it into the product and ran it for a month. The results were astounding; we decreased the error by less than a percentage.
The team got excited, and we scaled it up. First, we moved to 20% of our operations for another month, then 50%, and finally, we went all in.
I attribute the success to starting small with a pilot because it enabled us to pivot the solution when we learned some parts didn’t work. Also, we could observe the operations calmly while collecting real data. The pilot won the skeptical people, enabling us to transform how we managed the production inventory.
Steps for implementing a pilot project
How do you gain support to implement a pilot project?
Let’s take the previous example and break it down to what matters:
Find a problem worth solving: Identify something valuable to drive change. We identified the inaccurate inventory.
Define a compelling objective: Second, commit to a goal that matters. We challenged ourselves to reduce inventory errors from 10% to 1%.
Agree on the investment: Pilots come with a cost, and you need to clarify that you can get their approval.
Set the pilot timeframe: Pilots run for a limited period. Define how long you need to prove whether it’s worth progressing.
Run the pilot: Observe how the pilot project operates in production. Be as close as possible to it.
Measure results: Continuously evaluate the results. Strive to understand where the pilot is going and be open-minded to uncover potential improvements, even if that requires a pivot.
Iterate: Your first pilot version probably won’t cut, so you must adapt to what works as you envisioned.
Decide: As you reach the end of your pilot, you need to decide whether it was a success or failure. Be objective and make the call.
Scaling successful pilot projects
When your pilot is a success, the next natural step is to scale it up. You may think you should just do an immediate roll, but I’d encourage you to take a step-by-step approach.
Not everything that works with a small sample works with a bigger one. Here are my learnings and recommendations:
Double the audience: First, double the sample and run it for a certain period—probably the same as the initial pilot. This will help you understand how the pilot behaves with a larger audience.
Gradually scale until you reach your whole audience: Once you double your sample and acquire the same results, you can gradually scale the reach as you get expected results. For example, start with 5%, then 10%,20%,40%,80%, and 100%. Of course, the numbers depend on your scenario, but the key is to only advance if you still collect the desired results.
Adapt as needed: As you scale the reach, you will uncover new use cases, which is normal. Take your time adapting while keeping your eyes on the result.
Focus: It’s vital to remain focused on the pilot until you scale up to your audience. Sometimes, teams start moving to the next challenge, and the pilot team reduces when they are most needed. To ensure success, don’t do that.
Key elements of a pilot project plan
You may wonder how you can pitch your pilot project, given that too many people are resistant to trying new things. Let me simplify that for you with a template.
Keep it as simple as possible.
No business case.
No dozens of pages.
You need enough information on a single page that convinces people to learn more about it. Here are the key parts:
Name: Give a memorable name to your pilot project
Goal: Your pilot must have a compelling goal
Summary: High level overview on the context.
Investment: Estimate the high level investment
Durantion: Set how long the pilot project will last
Success criteria: Determine what you need to see to call it a success
Here’s the example of what we discussed earlier.
Conclusion and key takeaways
Pilot projects can help you win support for complex projects
Pilot projects aren’t the same as POC because they aim to run in production with a reduced sample
The result of a pilot project will show whether to scale up or cut costs
When running a pilot project, you do need laser laser and openness to learn what survives reality and adapt to your learnings
Start as small as possible while keeping your goals relevant. Aim to deliver value first, then you think about scaling up
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