Why Pilot Project are vital to Improvement Projects !!!

During the course of all improvement projects, potential improvement steps are discussed generally in brainstorming meetings attended by a cross-functional team, comprising of all the stakeholders involved in the process.

After the improvement step(s) are decided upon, an important question needs to be answered - "Should the improvement action be deployed partially first on an experimental manner in a pilot project or deployed completely in the whole work area?" Here, its very important that proper assessment of the impact that the improvement action is going to have, should be done before answering this question. Most of the times, organizations or consultants play it safe and deploy the improvement step first only in a small pilot project but many times, it also happens that key decision makers in organizations in a hurry to show the improvement in process decide to straight away deploy the improvement action in the whole work area, even if there are any objections for this.

This can turn out to be big gamble as in case the improvement action fails completely or doesn't show the expected results, all the investment made in the deployment of organization resources will go waste. But what may prove to be very damaging is it may shake the management's confidence in the improvement method adopted like Lean or Six Sigma or something else. Hence, its better that such decisions to deploy the improvement actions partially in a pilot project or straightaway deploy them fully should be left in the hands of experts & decision makers should pay serious attention to their advice.