The Pilot Day 1

Both Denis and I had flown to Toronto the day before and driven to a small town about ten miles from the plant and stayed in an hotel there for the night before. We arrived on site for about 8:30am and were warmly greeted by the receptionist at the plant.

We met with the plant manager and I began to set up the kit we had brought with us. This consisted of:

• 2 handheld Psion Workabout Pro devices running Windows Mobile.
• A wireless router.
• A laptop.
• A network cable.
• 2 docking stations
• 1 USB lead.
• Several extension cables.
• 1 Mouse.

We had taken the time the day before to arrive with a day to spare so that we could get the kit set up in my hotel room, test it out fully and make sure we were happy about everything. So, when we came to actually plug everything in, it was just a case of doing just that. No configuration, no setting anything up. This demonstrated that we were organised to the client.

I had included in my plan a Pre-Implementation meeting. I ran this so that we could get all the team members together from the plant including, and most importantly, the two operators who would be using the devices, together to go through the week ahead.

This went well and generated some excitement within the team. They were thrilled to be the ones chosen to pilot the system for the entire company and were looking forward to being trained in and using the system.

The meeting lasted for a couple of hours during which every aspect of what we would be doing was discussed. I asked for copies of filled in forms for the procedures they were running today to be copied and provided to me later on that day so that we could use these as material for the training. This is ALWAYS a good plan. Whenever providing training as part of a system implementation, use actual recent copies of paperwork, labels etc for the training. These items will be identifiable to those being trained. Fake, made up documents from ACME products Ltd will not work as well. In addition, the made up training documents will rarely include any oddities which are encountered on a day to day basis. Therefore, it's a good idea to get a heads up of these BEFORE the training begins.

I prepared the training notes I had done in readiness for the next day. The way I had organised the implementation was to give myself room to breathe on the first day. This way, if anyone threw anything at me last minute, I would at least have some chance to react.

During the course of the afternoon, I familiarised myself with the training due to take place the next day after lunch and spoke to my own team members to let them know how everything was going. I received a late update to the last procedure which the client had defined and made an observation that from what had been said earlier on that day, it was clear that another report would be beneficial. I made a rough sketch of what I needed to produce and at around 5pm drove back to the Hotel.

In the evening I sent a quick email back to my office just to let them know how things were going.

The tale continues.....