Choosing the Pilot

Allison Consultancy White Paper

Selection of Pilot Applications

It is the aim of Electronic Document Management (EDM) projects to demonstrate that the technology is viable, applicable throughout the company and will offer direct benefits to the company. A pilot project will verify the business processes and technical feasibility of this technology. In order to demonstrate successfully all the issues of EDM, both good and bad, a pilot application must meet certain criteria:

Make Good Use of EDM Features

The application should make use of the features of EDM which make it of benefit to business. In particular there should be a requirement to:

Process incoming documentation in paper, electronic and fax format.
Retrieve reference information in a flexible manner
Exchange and share information with others, often remotely
Work to closely defined time-scales
Comment (annotate) and mark up documents

The more of these requirements that exist, the higher the benefit for using EDM.

Be Manageable

To ensure success, the pilot must have clearly defined scope and objectives, and be able to be managed by a clearly identified manager.

You may want a pilot system which will allow all the lessons to be learned on a small number of workstations, before rolling out to the whole site. In this case someone who discovers a problem or limitation is praised for discovering it while the scale of the impact is still small.

Alternatively, the initial system may be intended to meet a need and work optimally from Day 1. In this case, the person who finds a ‘bug’ will not necessarily be thanked for it.

Either approach is equally valid, but it is essential that those managing it know what they want of the pilot, and prepare the participants accordingly.

Technical Issues

The pilot must have realistic goals and scope. In particular:

It should not require large amounts of information to be scanned in.
It should not disrupt the day-to-day business in the pilot area
It should not make unrealistic demands on the staff in terms of work-load or skills required.
It should not be over ambitious in what it is trying to achieve. However, it should not be under-ambitious either, or no benefit will be demonstrated.
The throughput of documents in the trial should not be too high nor too low. If it is too high, the system may not cope, and if it is too low, then there will not be enough experience gained. The ultimate goals for the system should define the scale for the pilot.

Be Self-Contained

A production imaging system would need to allow all staff to share and exchange documents no matter which part of the organisation they work in. However, for a pilot the application should be self-contained in terms of:

Number of staff involved in the business process
Number of documents that need to be scanned in
Number of functions that need to be performed
Reliance on interfacing with other application systems

Be Easily Monitored and Evaluated

The benefits sought should be identified in advance. The application should be such that the success or failure of the system to deliver these benefits can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy. Other factors, such as storage requirements and impact on existing systems and networks should also be measurable. This implies, of necessity, that the statistics to be measured to evaluate the system should be measured using the old system before implementation to give a datum line on which to base the evaluation.

The life-cycle of the business process should be sufficiently short, say a few weeks, so that a number of instances of the whole business process can be observed during the initial trial period.

Have a Willing Guinea Pig

The pilot application will place sizeable demands on the staff in the business area in terms of disruption, extra work, and training needs. It is important that these staff are committed to the successful testing of the application and are willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

About Allison Consultancy

Allison Consultancy is an independent organisation, which specialises in all aspects of EDM strategy, implementation and training and maintains links with all the suppliers in the EDM market. Through a network of experienced associates, we offer clients the skills of a consultant familiar with implementing EDM in similar situations to their own. We are pleased to work with clients at all stages from an initial feasibility study through building the business case, needs analysis and definition, procurement and implementation support and post project review.

Please call Dik or Joy Allison for further information: Tel 01777 871506 or e-mail info@allicon.com. .