Step 6 · Pilot the Solution

Test promising technology under realistic operational conditions with the people who will actually use it before committing to department-wide implementation.

Full guide planned · 10 min read
Step 6 · Pilot the Solution

The short version

Define what success means before the pilot begins. Without that, a pilot becomes a demonstration that lasts longer — everyone forms an impression and nobody can say whether it worked. Decide up front how long it runs, who takes part, which shifts and stations are included, and what conditions it has to survive. Write down the failure criteria as plainly as the success measures, and watch four things throughout: user feedback, technical performance, integration performance and what the support experience is actually like when something breaks.

See it applied

Worked example — built from published USFA sources, not from a department's reported results

Worked Case Study: The NERIS Transition Through the Technology Adoption Roadmap

Every fire department reporting incident data had to move from NFIRS to NERIS on a national timetable. The destination was fixed; almost everything else was still a local decision. This works the twelve steps through that transition, using published U.S. Fire Administration material for the facts and clearly labelled examples for everything a department would do locally.

Read it

Go deeper

Questions to ask your vendor

  1. How long does the pilot run, and who is in it?
  2. Are all shifts represented, including the ones that were not consulted?
  3. What does success look like in numbers we agreed beforehand?
  4. What would make us stop and walk away?
  5. How are we collecting feedback, and from whom?
  6. What happened the first time we called support?

This is a reading list, not a guide

Everything above was published by someone else, and is here because it is the clearest treatment of the subject we could find and verify. The Hub’s own guide to this topic is still being written. If you know a better source than the ones listed, that is worth telling us before it is.

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