3 Best Practices for Ensuring Successful Trial Closeout

Many water technology trials stall at closeout. Here are three best practices to help participants evaluate results and agree on next steps.

Reshmina William, Senior Project Manager, Isle Inc.

You’ve successfully completed the painstaking work of trial contracting, implementation, and documentation. Now, you’re almost at the finish line and it’s time to start thinking about how to translate trial data into concrete next steps. 

How can you set up your trial closeout and evaluation to ensure you have a strong foundation to support future growth and innovation? This blog captures a few best practices we’ve seen in the Trial Reservoirs Initiative’s nearly five years of operation. 

Why Does This Matter?

Closeout is an often-overlooked phase of trial design and management. However, closeout is critical to a trial’s success, ensuring that everyone is aligned on a clear path forward post trial. 

In particular, trial close-out is critical to addressing the following key factors:

• Data alignment. Although well-designed trial KPIs should leave little to subjective interpretation, closeout provides a final opportunity to ensure all stakeholders clearly understand the real-world implications of the trial data. Do the final results clearly capture whether the trial has met its stated KPIs? If not, should the trial be adjusted, scaled, or extended?

• Lessons learned. Trials offer an opportunity for design iteration within a controlled environment before full implementation. What worked, and what didn’t and needs to change? Are there any operational glitches, bottlenecks, or missed opportunities the team should be mindful of during scale-up? 

• Change management. Finally, trial closeout serves as an opportunity to share concrete success metrics with senior management and other key end-users. By demonstrating and documenting real-world results (including expected costs), closeout helps to build trust and allows easier budgeting for long-term implementation. 

Pathways to Success

• Keep clear and consistent documentation

Proper trial documentation throughout the trial lifecycle allows for smooth and efficient project closeout. 

Our trial managers provide expert review and guidance during KPI development for all Initiative trials. As part of this process, we clearly state expectations for data collection, documentation, and reporting: who will be collecting data related to KPI metrics, how they will be collecting it, and at what frequency. Stating these assumptions upfront allows us to track trial progress over the entire project lifecycle, and ensures that there are no surprises at the end of the trial. 

At a trial’s conclusion, trial managers request the final data needed to provide an impartial, third-party validation of trial results. The final evaluation report explicitly lists all the KPIs, their outcome (success/fail), and notes where the supporting evidence for each of these is located. Having concise, clear documentation directly tied to the trial’s original success metrics provides both the technology developer and the end-user a shared, objective foundation for further work. 

• Manage risks and resolve conflicts

Trial closeout also provides an opportunity to resolve any remaining conflicts, and to reflect on any lessons learned over the course of the project. 

For trials managed through the Initiative, trial managers act as an unbiased third party, mediating between the technology developer and the end-user. Our independence is key: because we do not directly represent either party, we are able to create space to hear both sides of the discussion before reaching a resolution. In most cases, conflicts can be resolved by going back to the original agreements (see the earlier point regarding the importance of trial documentation!). 

Project risk logs are another way to document and track risks over the course of a project, to ensure that they are managed promptly before they can escalate.  Regular trial project check-in meetings will frequently surface potential risks: supply chain bottlenecks, logistical delays, manufacturing backlogs. Having a running record of these risks not only makes them easier to track, but also provides documentation of lessons learned for future projects. 

• Capture next steps

Stakeholders can struggle to translate trial results – even positive ones – into concrete, actionable next steps. Trial closeout procedures can help to provide a roadmap for future activities, whether that’s procurement, participation in an RFP, or even further scaled-up demonstration. 

The Trial Reservoirs Initiative is designed to ensure that stakeholders come away from a trial with a clear path forward. Trial managers work together with stakeholders including both end-users and technology developers to define the terms for long-term engagement after a trial has successfully concluded. Importantly, we help negotiate these terms upfront – while building out other important parameters such as KPIs and trial success criteria. Having these terms in place and documented before the trial has even commenced removes an extra element of risk at the end of a trial.  

Interested in learning about how the Trial Reservoirs Initiative can support your trial? Contact Jo Burgess ([email protected]) to find out more.