Known assumptions won’t kill your program. The ones you don’t know you’ve made can.

When changing HR policies, business processes, technology or a combination of all three, it pays to verify our assumptions about how things will go.

Examples of assumptions we might make when implementing changes are:

• No significant issues will arise due to new working relationships the changes require.
• We know enough to make the policies, processes and technology work together.
• We have the necessary support to handle any problems that will occur.

A pilot project is a low-cost way to uncover these hidden assumptions and avoid the problems they can cause. A simple 5-step process is shown below.

A pilot uses the same implementation process as planned for the main project but with a much smaller, but representative, number of participants. Examples of how to choose participants are:

• Where changes will affect many similar business groups, select a single group to participate in the pilot.
• Where changes will affect multiple levels in an organization, select a few people from each level to participate.

Get feedback about the problems encountered by:

• Interviewing participants.
• Online participant questionnaires/assessments.
• Reviewing issues reported to Help Desks, etc.

Modify our plans - to eliminate problems identified in step 2, for example:

• By including coaching and/or training on how to handle change, communicate effectively, value diversity, understand behavioral styles.
• By adding development of new workarounds.

Finally we run the main project with all the changes identified as necessary by the pilot(s). Once complete we should review how effective our approach to setting up pilots was and, if appropriate, revise it for future projects.