What a pilot actually involves

Start from the report you need, not from the feature list

The useful first question is not which features you want. It is: at the end of this, what does somebody have to be able to prove, and to whom. A regulator asking who completed the annual training. A customer asking whether the engineers on their account are certified. A manager asking why half the team has not started.

Tell us which of those you are actually answering, and the rest of the scope follows from it — including whether elmo is the right thing at all, which we would rather establish in week one than in month six.

What we need from you

Less than you would expect, and none of it is a commitment:

• A cluster, or a decision not to use one yet. elmo runs on any Kubernetes you operate. If you do not have one to spare, a pilot can run on a small cluster we stand up with you and tear down afterwards.
• A rough shape of the people. How many, in how many teams, who supervises whom, and whether they sign in with your directory or with a password.
• One real course. Not a demo. Material you actually have to deliver, because the interesting problems — its length, its media, whether it needs a hands-on lab, who is allowed to see it — only appear with real content.
• The awkward requirement. The governance rule, the works-council constraint or the reporting obligation you think will break this. It is the most useful thing you can send and the cheapest thing to test early.

What the two weeks look like

The platform installed on your cluster, your directory connected, one course deployed behind its own hostname and gated, a class opened with real dates and real people, and the reports produced from actual use rather than seeded data.

Then the part that matters: we sit down with the report and go through what each figure counts and what it does not, against the obligation you named in week one. If the answer is that it does not carry that obligation, that is a finding, not a failure — and you will have it before you have bought anything.

What you get at the end

A written account of what was built, what it measured, what it cost to run, and the current list of limits. If you stop there, you keep the document and the cluster stays yours. Nothing about a pilot is designed to leave you somewhere it is awkward to leave from.