The first thing we always recommend companies do when thinking about running a Cultivate Forecasts pilot (or any business software pilot for that matter) is to think about the scope of the pilot. Defining the scope will serve two purposes: it will help you begin thinking about how you're going to run this pilot, and gives you a few notes to send around to others to help communicate what you're doing.

Here are the areas we'd recommend thinking about and potentially documenting:

1) What are you trying to achieve? 

Close the gap between leadership and and employee "ground truth"; a greater sense of communication and transparency; more accurate predictions in certain areas, such as operational risk factors, sales forecasts, key performance metrics, etc.

2) Why is this approach necessary for the problem you're trying to solve? 

For example, currently leaders lack a way to capture field intelligence to make more informed decisions; the business environment is too dynamic for traditional forecasting methods; a probabilistic forecast is more action-oriented than current output.

3) Who will initially be asked to participate in the pilot? 

We recommend trying to have at least 25 people participate, minimum. Since, it is rare to get 100% participation on any new initiative, you will need to invite more people than you want actively forecasting. 

4) What is the timeline for the pilot? 

A pilot needs to be 3-6 months in length: long enough to learn what you need to learn but worst case, short enough to fail quickly without too much resource commitments

5) What are the immediate next steps? 

Contact us about a pilot, think about who you would invite, ensure you have a leadership sponsor with influence who can be an advocate for this new approach to working, define your success factors, come up with an initial set of questions that will be asked, have an initial sense for how the outputs from the application will be shared (i.e. reports to executives, commentary and feedback to participants from leadership).

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