Let’s start with a number you probably know: your last major ERP implementation.
Do you remember what it was supposed to cost? Now do you remember what it actually cost?
Birmingham City Council approved an Oracle implementation in 2019 at an estimated £19 million. As of early 2026, the project has consumed over £144 million, remains only partially functional five years after its planned go-live, and at one point left the council unable to detect fraud for eighteen months. The council is now re-implementing the system from scratch.
No one demanded a pilot before that decision. No one asked the technology team to run a small test, prove the concept, and come back with a business case. The initiative was approved, funded, and launched at full scale — because it was an ERP, and that’s how ERPs get done.
Now think about the last time your HR team wanted to change something. A new onboarding process. A revised performance framework. A different approach to workforce planning. Did you ask for a pilot?
I’d wager you did. Most executives do. And that asymmetry — multi-million technology investments approved on faith, people-led changes required to prove themselves in a sandbox first — is worth sitting with.
The High Cost of Pilot Purgatory
The consulting industry loves to cite failure rates. Many of those figures, when you trace them back, are circular — the same estimate passed between reports until it acquires the appearance of research. So let me stick to what’s actually documented.
55 – 75% of ERP projects fail to meet their objectives — exceeding budget, missing timelines, or failing to deliver intended outcomes. Source: Gartner
Not fringe projects. Not underfunded experiments. Major, well-resourced implementations by organizations that knew exactly what they were doing.
And yet ERP initiatives rarely get asked to prove themselves in a pilot first. The investment gets approved. The rollout begins. When it fails, the cost is quietly absorbed.
Compare that to how we treat HR initiatives. Research consistently finds that a significant share of digital transformation initiatives stall at the scaling phase — never making it out of what practitioners call “pilot purgatory.” Not because they failed the test. Because the test never ended.
The pilot became the destination.
The Political Pilot
Here’s what doesn’t get said enough: many pilots are not learning tools. They are political ones.
I call them political pilots, and I’ve watched them play out across my entire career. A new idea is proposed. A pilot is demanded. The pilot runs, often successfully. And then — nothing. The initiative stalls, the team exhausts itself, the budget runs out, and the organization remains unchanged.
This happens because the pilot was never about learning. It was a performance of action — a way to manage stakeholders, defer a difficult decision, or survive until the next budget cycle without committing to anything. The goal wasn’t to scale. The goal was to appease.
Pilots used this way aren’t prudent. They’re a veto dressed up as due diligence.
What I Do Instead
Here’s where I diverge from conventional change management thinking.
I don’t start with a pilot. I start with the decision makers.
By the time I propose an initiative, I’ve already done the work. I have the data. I have the relationships. I’ve built the coalition. Buy-in isn’t the outcome of a successful pilot — it’s the prerequisite for change. If I haven’t earned that trust yet, a pilot won’t earn it for me. And if I have, I don’t need one.
When I propose a change, I propose a phased implementation. Not a test — a commitment. The end state is defined before phase one begins. The infrastructure, training, governance, and success metrics for full deployment are planned in advance. Phase one launches not as “maybe,” but as the first permanent component of something we’ve already decided to do.
That shift in framing changes everything. A pilot says: we’re trying this out, don’t get your hopes up. A phased rollout says: this is the future. Here’s how we’re going to get there together.
The Question Worth Asking
The next time someone on your team proposes a pilot, before you approve it, ask one question: what does this pilot need to prove — and to whom?
If the answer is “we need to understand how this will work in practice,” that’s a legitimate knowledge gap. A pilot may be the right tool.
If the answer, honestly, is “we need to show stakeholders we’re being careful” — that’s a political pilot. And the cost of that caution isn’t zero. It’s the time, attention, and momentum of the people running it, and the signal it sends to every team watching: that change here requires permission at every step.
Birmingham City Council didn’t pilot its way to £144 million. It approved a transformation without the change management foundations to support it.
The irony is that the discipline executives routinely skip on technology — the coalition-building, the people-first planning, the clear definition of success before you begin — is exactly what HR leaders are being asked to prove in a sandbox before they’re allowed to try.
The problem was never whether to test. It was what we chose to trust.
Toni Larkwin is co-founder of Larkwin Group, a fractional HR and technology consultancy. She has led people and organizational change across healthcare, financial services, and the public sector for over 20 years.