There can be a tendency on the part Senior Responsible Owners (SRO) and other senior governing stakeholders to see pilot and trial activities as a quick and cheap way to get their objectives met. 

This needs to be countered by careful briefing, the agreement of clear objectives and the introduction of a robust governance structure. 

A gate-based structure may be appropriate but whether or not formal gates are adopted a regular formal forum at which necessary changes to scope or approach can the addressed and either approved or rejected is critically important. The active involvement of the SRO in these sessions is vital as is a willingness to cancel or make radical changes if necessary.

If the SRO is more accustomed to holding project managers to account for delivery than being actively involved in the project process there may be a need for the project manager to spend more time with them outside of the formal sessions. To get the most out of pilot and trial activities the SRO really needs to be very close to detail of what is going on.

It may be that adopting a formal behavioural model such as SCARF - Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness - will help in drawing the SRO and project team closer together. Given the critical importance of the SROs active involvement in the process, time spent at the beginning of the process addressing any engagement issues will be time well spent.

As with all project activities, lessons learned and risks should be captured on an on-going basis and fed into the decision making process. The governance approach needs to be lesson and risk centric and offer the opportunity to respond flexibly and quickly to new discoveries. 

For pilot studies, governance needs to reflect the uncertainty of scope and regularly address the question of continuation and direction. At the end of the study, a clear way forward (which can include not going ahead) needs to be formally identified. 

For trials, governance needs to focus on the effectiveness of the plan being trialled, the risks associated with scalability and the complexities of the interface between the ‘trial user group’ and the rest of the business running with the existing business model.