The Swiss Project Management Journal
The People Project
want to communicate with those affected
using social media, we need to first under-
stand how they communicate using social
media, and then define the pilot around
that, and their needs.” Tarun also men-
tioned that nascent concerns, such as on-
line data privacy, must be considered.
Tarun’s team, which manages the pilot,
will analyse their findings and contribute
this to the definition of the project which
later will follow. They will conduct a self-
assessment with the project sponsor be-
fore doing a type of handover to the pro-
ject manager. Tarun further explained,
“the definition, design, testing and scale-
up of pilots is determined during the pilot.
In a sense, my team explores options to
find the right solution. We then bring
these results to the project sponsor, who
then ensures the ICRC validation is ob-
tained, and the scaling up of the project is
realized.”
There is one clear example where the
piloting approach saved a lot of time and
prevented wasted effort: A new tablet-
based system for gathering population in-
formation was intended to be a 21st cen-
tury way to collect census data but the
pilot in Mali revealed a blocker which
would have been horrible to discover
after a full rollout. Traditionally, field offi-
cers went from population to population
Robert Whelan, PMP, is the Head of the Project
Management Office at the ICRC in Geneva. Robert
joined the ICRC in 2008 and has worked as a delegate in
the Philippines, Afghanistan and in Israel/Occupied
Territories as well as at headquarters in a variety of
posts. He has extensive project and portfolio manage-
ment experience in a variety of fields including re-
search and development, technology and education in a range of organi-
zations such as the European Commission, New York University as well as in
the Pacific region. Robert holds a doctorate in psychology and an MSc. in
ergonomics. He qualified as a project management professional (PMI) in
2012 and is an IAF certified professional facilitator.
with database-entry forms (in paper
format, attached to a clipboard), filling
these out by hand, delivering them to the
central offices to be entered digitally into
the database, where the data would be
analysed and results obtained.
When considering that around fifty-
thousand families were being surveyed,
you can appreciate the sheer amount of
data involved.
But the new system was going to bring
improvements! The data would be en-
tered into the database while the officer
was still in the field. This increases accu-
racy, efficiency, and enables real-time
analysis. The purpose of the pilot was to
help evaluate just how great the im-
provements were going to be! But the
surprising outcome was this: field officers
are personally in no position to take on
the responsibility of receiving, maintai-
ning, and protecting expensive and
complicated equipment such as tablets.
In the end, the pilot determined that the
new system was not going to succeed; the
people on the field just simply were not
comfortable with the complexity and
responsibility this would have required.
The pilot approached helped to highlight
that, to introduce technology, understand
not only its potential benefits but as well
its perception on the ground.
The pilots vary hugely. In one case, Tarun
had a pilot of just one person, and another
case, he and his team are running three
pilots in three different countries (Mali,
Nigeria, Ukraine) each country with its
own context (infrastructure, technolo-
gical development). This is a pilot which
involves over fifty dedicated people.
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
10
2017 Edition