Every industrial company that conducts a successful pilot project with mixed reality solutions eventually reaches a moment of truth when they ask themselves the essential question.

How do we scale this through the broader organization?

Maybe you’re asking that question yourself. Maybe you’ve followed some of the suggested processes that we’ve laid out in our previous blogs on adoption of mixed reality. (In case you missed them, we detailed five steps to generate buy-in by end-users and selecting the right use case for your mixed reality pilot.) The key performance indicators (KPIs) are telling you that mixed reality (MR) can solve some problems within your operations. But how do you take this high-potential technology beyond a core group of evangelists? You could conclude that without a workable plan to expand MR throughout your operations, your pilot project hasn’t really been successful yet.

In this article, we will provide insight on processes that will help you succeed in building on your successful pilot and spreading the benefits of MR throughout your operations. This approach is similar to our advice on conducting pilots, with a reliance on essential individuals and key performance indicators that are geared towards driving usage and promoting better outcomes for frontline workers.

Evangelize the Initial Pilot

A successful pilot project often generates intense excitement among a small group of participants, but it would be a mistake to assume that excitement has spread throughout the whole organization. Our clients have found a nudge is usually needed. So, the first step – a crucial step, actually – is to make sure your colleagues know about the success of the pilot.

We’d suggest such vehicles as targeted newsletters, or internal conferences and communications to relay the results, but ultimately it is whatever channel you know your organization uses the most. While requiring a bit more work before announcing your success, videos can be especially powerful since they can show the MR solution in use, which helps to tie together the concept and reality. Remember, to most of the organization this is likely unfamiliar technology, so it’s essential that you explain the benefits of the MR solution to generate interest and start building executive buy-in.

A before-and-after presentation of the most important KPIs can be very powerful in persuading both the brass and team members that MR can benefit the company. As we explained in the previous articles, choose KPIs that clearly show a critical pain point for the operation, then display the same KPIs at the end of the pilot.

Why is this so important? Other than the obvious uplift among staff, it will inspire your colleagues to think of other relevant use cases for the technology and then you can engage new stakeholders, who may be unfamiliar with MR technology but are ready to take the leap with their teams. What’s more, these steps can help to start building all-important executive buy-in.

Build an MR Scale Team:

Selecting the MR scale team may be the most important step in spreading this solution throughout the organization. This deployment team will guide the organization’s adoption of MR technologies, so it’s essential to have strong leadership and a clear mandate. But that doesn’t mean building this team has to be an onerous task, like hiring a full team of new recruits. You’re choosing champions from within your existing staff and bringing them into this exciting and rewarding initiative. Many will have already reacted positively to the communications on the pilot program, this will let you clearly identify those with a high level of engagement and who are keen to get started.

This team should encompass a wide cross-section of your organization and must have executive buy-in and authority to drive the technological change forward. However, it’s important that the team fits under operations management. This sets the tone for what the scale team is designed to achieve: operational innovation and excellence.

We’d recommend your MR scale team include these members:

Executive champion:

A C-level or senior leader who will ensure the project has buy-in and visibility at the executive level.

Scale team lead:

This person, who reports to the executive champion, is responsible for project management, reporting, and communication. As the manager of the scale team, they must work to establish the KPIs, current baseline metrics of operations, and measure performance for both individual deployments and across the project. This person will also record deployments and their outcomes in a scale matrix and deployment logbook -- we will explain their importance later in this article. They should also report each month to the executive champion, providing updates on deployments, successes, and areas for improvement to ensure that leadership is seeing the value in their investment.

The responsibility for being project manager of various MR deployments is eventually passed off to deployment leads as the scale project expands. The KPI recording and measurement functions role can eventually be broken out into a separate role: the business analyst.

IT and MR lead:

The IT and MR lead is an IT administrator who will be responsible for providing domain, network, and other IT infrastructures needed to have the hardware and software deployed across the organization. This person works closely with the MR vendor(s) and will serve as the in-house technical expert. They will be responsible for training end-users, troubleshooting technology issues, and ensuring end-user compliance.

As the scale project grows, this role may be broken into two positions: the IT lead and the MR Technology Lead.

Deployment leads:

Deployment leads are brought into the scale project to manage specific deployments. For example, some plants may have, say, 50 end-users in some deployments. The deployment lead must work closely with the end-users and the localized champions, drawing on the expertise of the vendors and the rest of the scale team to make sure all the wrinkles are ironed out ensuring end-users are able to confidently use the solution to enhance their capability.

As the project expands, so too should the scale team.

The scale team ideally should initially meet bi-weekly to report their progress, discuss issues, and help one another overcome any problems as they become operational. These meetings are an ideal time to discuss end-user adoption, ensuring that the technology is being used properly and change management is progressing smoothly. Keep in mind the frequent discussions you had when you were going through your pilot phase. As the technology becomes part of the status quo, these meetings may be able to be held monthly.

Each month, the deployment leads, in collaboration with other team members, should report on the progress, KPIs, challenges, and successes leading all the way up the funnel to your project leads and invested executives.

Strategic Deployment Planning:

First, we have to identify a pain point that can be scaled throughout the operations. As we pointed out when discussing pilot programs, it has to be a fundamental part of the operations, and it is helpful if it’s quantifiable. As the use of MR increases throughout the operations, stakeholders must see the improving KPIs to ensure long-term buy-in.

Using the expertise of your multi-disciplinary project team, identify the most relevant pain points – those that are costly, increasingly frustrating to deal with, or prone to disruption.

The team can plot the business groups, departments, and use cases that most contribute to these pain points. They will make for ideal deployment candidates.

Make sure to have the baseline KPIs before you start. In doing this, consider what pain points you identified, what you learned in the pilot project and the strengths of the MR technology. The KPIs are essential to your project’s success, but meaningless without the proper baseline.

Also, ensure that the pain points are part of the operations that can benefit from MR. You need to remain mindful that this is not a one-size-fits-all technology, and you have to make sure to consistently choose appropriate use cases. How do you know if it’s an appropriate use case? A good point to start is by asking end-users and frontline workers before starting the project and asking again as the deployment unfolds.

It should be noted that as your scale project encompasses more and more deployments across operations, your project will encounter new metrics that are worth measuring.

By diligently measuring KPI baselines on an individual deployment basis and feeding that data into a logbook, you’ll gain a more holistic view of how the scale project is impacting your organization. Expect to encounter unplanned measurable metrics, use cases, and intangible benefits and embrace them.

You have to set clear goals to ensure that deployments are aligned with organizational objectives. These goals fall into two categories:

Deployment goals: Units deployed, business groups/functions involved, geographical locations, company subsidiaries involved, etc.
KPI goals: These will depend on the nature of the MR tech you’re scaling and will also be subject to expansion as more data is gathered from various deployments.

The scale team should attempt to meet their goals over one to two years and establish milestones in six-month intervals to ensure that scale efforts will meet the predefined goals.

If you’re meeting your goals ahead of schedule or in greater numbers than anticipated, consider ramping up your scaling efforts to maximize the impact.

It’s important to note that your deployment planning should include deployment ideation. As the team progresses with its work, it gathers data and generates interest among the staff. This means there’s an opportunity to select the most high-value and impactful use cases for the scale project. These should be highly repeatable and relevant to multiple divisions or business units within your organization.

Finally, these deployments should have enough in common with the initial pilot to build on the learnings achieved from it, while still testing the limitations of the technology.

Create a Scale Logbook:

The logbook is essential in tracking the progress of the scaling initiative. It consists of three primary elements:

• One scale matrix model to map the progress of the scale project in the context of its goals. In the scale matrix model, the scale team initiates micro-deployments across the organization. It monitors each of these small pilots to assess the best use cases and procedures for deploying MR.

• A deployment log page, which digs deeper into each phase of an individual deployment.

• A deployment KPI sheet associated with each phase of an individual deployment. You should set up a cover section and regularly update the scale matrix to provide an at-a-glance overview of how the scale project is progressing. Then each individual deployment should have its own log page, so you can track each use case.

Deployment leads fill out as much of the log page as possible at the start of the deployment, and update it as the deployment progresses. Additional data in the deployment KPI sheet should be attached to the log page to support the further scaling, pausing, or axing of the deployment.

Until MR becomes ingrained in your operations, you’ll want to make sure the technology is delivering an impact worth the investment. The logbook should tell you where you stand on your roadmap.

Deployment Execution:

This phase of MR adoption is really just repeating the processes of the pilot projects on a larger scale, armed with knowledge to speed up deployments.

If you have followed each of the steps outlined above, you should be set up for success, but there are things to remember as you continue to scale.

You must choose real-world use cases derived from operational challenges that are appropriate for an MR solution, and all levels of the scale team will have to work together to ensure you find the optimal fit. Feedback – especially from front-line workers – is of the utmost importance, not just during the planning but throughout the process and beyond.

Hopefully, you will have chosen a vendor with a strong support program in place, so it will work with you and help to smooth the deployment process.

And remember the logbook, it will be your north star until the solution is completely integrated. It requires regular entries for both the overall project and individual deployments. Pay attention to what those data tell you. It will help to determine where MR is helping you and what deployments should be altered or abandoned.

Success at Scale With Mixed Reality:

The key to successful scale projects often lies in the diligent attention to detail employed in the pilot projects which will act as your cornerstone to scaled usage. The companies that followed the right steps in the pilot – finding the right vendor and in-house champions, nailing the proper use case, and establishing the right KPIs – are likely to have the most success in scaling MR throughout their organization.

That said, it’s important to keep an open mind during the project and be willing to alter or halt some use cases. As we’ve stressed in previous blogs: MR is not an answer to every problem. But, it is masterful in addressing many problems that plague industrial organizations. The most successful companies in the next ten years will identify those problems and figure out how mixed reality can address them.

Transitioning Mixed Reality Pilots into Essential Deployments