A well run pilot scheme can tease out many potential cultural issues and enable them to be addressed in the project plan.

Misunderstanding the cultural challenges.

Inadequate / inappropriate risk management – use of pilot and trial stages in a large project is a key risk mitigation tactic.Sloppy procurement – again starting with a small scale pilot offers the opportunity to keep buying under control.Poor financial management – small scale initial activities offer the opportunity for greater control over finances.

Woeful user / stakeholder engagement – both pilot and trial activities require positive stakeholder engagement and also offer the opportunity to test wider stakeholder management plans.

Skills / experience gaps – opportunity to identify and close these gaps before significant resources have been expended.

Corporate amnesia with lessons not being learnt or applied – both pilot and trial activities have a strong focus of lessons learned.

Ill-defined roles and responsibilities – clear terms of reference and objectives created for and confirmed during pilot.

Many of the causes of major programme failure as identified by Richard Bacon in ’Conundrum – Why every government get things wrong – and what we can do about it’ can be addressed to some extent at least by the use of pilot and trial activities: The use of pilot and trial stages can - if managed properly - significantly improve the chances of success. Catching on to what is happening, his close friend Jim tries to talk him out of it by calling him a 'guinea pig'.As with all project activities success is founded on clarity of objectives and outcomes, clear communication with the team and thorough expectation setting with stakeholders.Ĭarefully written terms of reference and governance structures are key to success. They approach the first character, let's call John and try to convince him to start using a certain something (John doesn't know about the secret plan). The leaders of the tribe within the fantasy world in which the story takes place, have devised a new system they want to secretly institute. My main motivation is to avoid the cliche, since I find 'guinea pig' and 'lab rat' are used too often and the characters in my story use more sophisticated terms. I'm hoping someone knows of a good term with the same interpretation but completely different and unrelated to 'guinea pig'. I don't simply want other words for 'guinea pig', like rodent or cavy. What is another term that would carry the same meaning (other than 'lab rat')? If someone is being used to test a new product or idea, they can be called a 'guinea pig' (because Guinea Pigs are usually used by medical labs for testing).

Another word for running tests