Conclusion

Martin felt relief. For the first time in a long while, he could relax. Martin and his team had delivered on the goals and requirements of the project. The pilot was a huge success. As the pilot was deployed, more and more business units wanted to be part of it. At first, the team tried to accommodate as many as they could. In the end, many business units had to wait for deployment. With a good core of solid work done and a transition book ready, Martin could relax and know that the deployment would go smoothly.

Jason rubbed his weary, jet- lagged eyes and met with his manager. They had no choice but to stop the pilot. The failing could be traced back to the POC. The decisions made there would follow Jason and his team through the pilot. The change in the goals of the pilot by adding the need for other password replacement should have caused the POC to be extended. The fact that the digital certificates were a global project involving all lines of business should have spurred Jason to include groups outside of project management. Once the scope of the pilot was changed to global, the senior manager should have asked for more budget and resources. When Jason first started having problems in Europe, he should have slowed down and addressed them then and there. By moving on and not fixing the problems, he left one area in a bad state and started another with possibly the same outcome. The root cause of the failure was having to start a major project that was coupled with an existing project entering its deployment stage. This caused extra pressure and time constraints on the new project to play quick catch-up with the original project. This forced corners to be cut and steps to be skipped in the methodology.

The pilot is the transition point from the POC to the rollout. It builds on the foundation laid by the POC and validates the technology on a larger scale. This validation must take into account all aspects of the solution and its suitability for rollout. In this phase, more time is spent simulating a rollout and anticipating what questions will be asked and answered . Methodologies for deployment, user indoctrination, training, and support are refined and modified. Lastly, once the pilot is deployed and functioning, discussions begin on making a go/no go decision. Based on those discussions, a general indication is given on the next step. If it is a go, then additional work begins on gathering the information required for the transition to a rollout and the transition book is started. If the pilot is not moving forward, then plans are made to quickly and effectively decommission the existing pilot infrastructure.

Most importantly, however, the pilot is the last chance to get things right. By the time the project gets to the rollout stage, all the major problems should have been overcome and a deployment methodology should be known and tested .