Conference Rooms

The New Conference Room Pilot
By Paul Deis

Overview

Making major business systems work requires planning, vision, leadership, teamwork and great effort. This presentation explains the role of the Conference Room Pilot (CRP) in helping to ensure success, how to help re-engineer the company business system, how to set one up and operate it.

What is a Conference Room Pilot?

A methodology to develop and simulate operation of a system, to learn how it works/should work and how best to manage the business with it -- prior to "live" implementation.

On-Line, interactive, integrated systems and software confound traditional evaluation and implementation planning methods. Various “friendliness” issues and software “personality” are much easier to evaluate and understand in a live simulation than through documentation review, flow charts and vendor sales pitches. It can be on line or on paper.

The CRP has traditionally been associated with the testing and business modeling with new computer software, but can also be used to handle evaluation of policies, procedures, organization, forms, training and performance measurements. It can be used to test changes to existing systems. The closer one gets to reality, the more effective the training experience. It is becoming more common to leave a CRP database in place to use as a permanent test bed and education/training tool.

Applications

Some people use the term CRP to mean testing software prior to implementation. While this is an excellent application, the list below indicates that there are far more uses:

The CRP may be used to:

• Explore policy/procedure issues, alternative solutions and initiate improvements.
• Partially or completely re-engineer the company system for improved performance.
• Train employees in the operation of the system/software- policies, procedures, software, forms, and reports.
• Gain a practical understanding/evaluate how the software really works- approach, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Test accuracy of vendor proposals, claims, and documentation.
• Help develop a workable plan for conversion, implementation and utilization of the software as part of an overall system.
• Provide education in how a manufacturing system and software could work- especially interdepartmental relationships.
• Facilitate constructing system descriptions and demonstrations of regulatory compliance.

The CRP may be used during one or more system lifecycle phases:

• Identification and development of policies, procedures and operating approach.
• Shakedown cruise to refine/debug software, policies, procedures, training and even organizational approach.
• Ongoing training tool.
• Ongoing test bed for new/modified software, policies, procedures, application areas, including system integration.