The pilot succeeded. The first rollout site did not come close. Nobody wrote down the difference.
A pilot does not run under normal conditions, and the result cannot be extrapolated until somebody has.
Project staff on site. Direct access to developers. Defects fixed in forty-eight hours. Reduced caseload targets. Key users released. A general willingness to work around problems because everybody knows it is temporary.
All of that is real, all of it inflates the result, and almost none of it is recorded — because it is booked as project cost rather than as part of the pilot.
The rollout site will receive none of it.
Keep a compensation log from day one. Every hour of project presence, every expedited fix, every target adjustment, every unfunded key user hour. It is a spreadsheet and it takes two minutes a day.
Then extrapolation means choosing: subtract the compensation, or commit to reproducing it at every site and budget for it. What is not available is recording it as project cost and carrying the percentage forward.
Without that log, a pilot cannot tell you whether your solution works. It can only tell you what happens when a solution is surrounded by people who are paid to make it work.
The compensation log is one of the nine instruments in Built to Be Used.
#ProjectManagement #ChangeManagement #Pilot
This article accompanies the book Built to Be Used.