Step 4 – Reviewing the pilot

This final stage sometimes tends to get forgotten. You have deployed the solution, the users have been testing it, and then it ends there for whatever reason. However, there is one very important last thing to do to enable you to move into production.

You need to measure user experience and the IT department's experience against the success criteria that you set out at the start of this process. You need to get customer sign-off and agreement that you have successfully met all of the objectives and requirements. If this is not the case, you need to understand the reasons why. Have you missed something in the use case, have the user requirements changed, or is it simply a perception issue?

Whatever the case, you need to cycle around the process again. Go back to the use case, understand and reevaluate the user requirements (what it is that is seemingly failing or not behaving as expected), and then tweak the design or make the required changes and get the users to test the solution again.

You need to continue this process, repeating again and again until you get acceptance and sign-off, otherwise you will not get to the final solution deployment phase.

When the project has been signed off after a successful pilot test, there is no reason why you cannot deploy the technology in production. However, it is useful to come back and revisit this occasionally to ensure that nothing has changed.

Now that we have talked about how to prove the technology and successfully demonstrated that it delivers against both your business case and your user requirements, in the following sections, we are going to start looking at designing a production environment.