The first step is to make sure there is a team in charge of the piloting system. The creation of a team will assure different perspectives in the design and coherence in the evaluation. Remember that piloting doesn’t “happen”, it requires preparation.

• Have a clear goal:
  Be sure of what you are going to pilot, the extent of the trial and its impact and situation in the overall project.
  Understand very well what you are looking for when testing and what are you measuring, as well as which are the key performance indicators you will look after and how to evaluate them.
• Design the actions:
  Once you know what you are measuring and the format of evaluation, design the actions that allow the team to face the situations, difficulties and scenarios that you are willing to test. Think openly at first but be concise when understanding the results you are looking forward to.

Be critical and flexible. In the prototyping you will face many situations you may not be prepared for or that were not in mind when you designed the product or the process of the testing environment. All feedbacks are welcome, embrace them.

Prototyping is not a linear phase, so there may be situations in which the prototyping team feels like going backwards more steps than forward. But in reality, the process looks like a growing spiral; you may feel you are back at the start but your circle is now bigger.

Set a prototyping time frame. Give your team a time limit for prototyping and don’t let “it is not ready yet” be an argument to break the frame you set.

Once the prototype is ready, or the prototyping time is over, as one true learning organization never ceases to change and never closes its eyes and ears to feedback; the implementation begins.

The mottoes “it’s better done than perfect” and “fail fast, fail early, fail often but always fail forward” will be the best go-to quotes for your team.

Start small and see how the project develops. Keep it flexible and pivot as much as you can listening to the users and other stakeholders. Empower the team to bring feedback and test potential new features fast and often.

Don’t be afraid to conduct evaluation and feedback sessions with the different stakeholders. To create a community you need to make everyone feel heard and taken care of. But remember, listening, asking for people to communicate, means committing to give back. The worst enemy of participatory processes isn’t failing in the implementation, is apathy.

Once you have implemented part of the process down, be sure to sit and learn from the process. Share with the team, understand the pain points and the strengths and how to learn from the journey. Once you have reflected, share with the community.

In order to leave everything ready for the upcoming implementation processes and future endeavors, highlight the key and critical points and leave comments and tips as well as warnings.

Remember, the better you can extract learnings and notes, the easier it will be for future implementation processes not to struggle with the same issues.