Beginning a Pilot? How to Pick Your Rooms

In AV customer success circles, the legend of the perfect pilot lives on: the AV team chooses the newest, most tightly integrated room with the best connectivity, where everything simply works together in perfect harmony. They roll out the AV monitoring platform, and it works perfectly for 60 days. This pilot is so perfect that they deploy the platform across the entire enterprise.

Which, of course, is when disaster strikes. Because most rooms have at least some aging equipment that does not respond to remote commands. And unreliable connectivity. And loose integration. And plenty of other surprises.

The takeaway from this legend? Even the perfect monitoring platform needs to work under less-than-perfect conditions. That makes your choice of pilot rooms a key part of a successful rollout. In this blog, I'll share what we've learned from helping enterprise AV teams choose pilot rooms, avoid common mistakes, and collect the evidence they need to make a case for a wider rollout.

The Flip Side: Turning a Pilot into a Deployment

Before we get to the do’s, there’s one more don’t for your AV monitoring pilot: don’t try to do too much. If the first mistake is choosing a room where nothing ever goes wrong - trying to monitor everything, everywhere, all at once is another recipe for trouble.

On the face of it, the logic seems sound. You're eventually going to connect hundreds or thousands of devices, so why not get a head start?

One media company we worked with did just this. They originally planned to pilot an entire site. Then they discovered that even just putting together an accurate list of devices and their locations was more complicated than they had expected. Eventually, they scaled back to just three rooms.

And that was fine. A pilot does not need to emulate an enterprise-wide deployment to prove its value. It needs a manageable mix of devices and room configurations that can tell you whether the platform works under real-world conditions.

What Should Make the Cut? 

The trick is to choose a mix that will put your monitoring platform to the test in different ways - from busy rooms and known trouble spots to standard setups, remote locations, and equipment whose failure everyone notices. Here are five pilot candidates worth considering, and what each can help you learn:

1. Your busiest room. More meetings mean more chances for things to go wrong - and more opportunities to catch problems before users start calling for help. One global media company we worked with deliberately chose its busiest room for a pilot. They figured that if anything was going to go wrong, that was a good place to find out.
2. The room that's always acting up. Every AV team has a room with recurring problems that keeps support on its toes. The same media company included one of its known trouble spots, specifically to see whether the platform could spot an issue before a user needed to reach out for support.
3. One of your standard rooms. If you've got hundreds of rooms with essentially the same setup, why reinvent the wheel? An engineering firm we worked with had more than 1,000 near-identical rooms. They decided to just test one representative room to learn about what it would take to monitor the rest.
4. A remote room or site. It's one thing to troubleshoot a device down the hall. It's another when the nearest AV technician is hundreds of miles away. A media company we worked with included a remote site that its team managed from another location to see if they could identify and resolve problems without making the trip.
5. A digital sign. Nobody may notice when a little-used meeting room goes offline. A broken digital sign in a busy hallway is another story. As our customer put it, "We look bad when we can't keep a simple digital sign up." It's a useful test of whether your monitoring platform can catch a problem before the whole office notices.

Before Day One: Do Your Homework

Once you’ve chosen what to include in your pilot, you need to make sure everything is ready before you start. Some preparation here can save you a lot of head-scratching later:

1. Know your baseline. Understanding exactly how you find out about problems today, and how long it typically takes to fix them, is crucial to measuring the success of your pilot.
2. Get your device list together. Build a BOM with IP addresses, MAC addresses, and which room each device is located in. Identify which vendor clouds you'll connect and who has administrator access to each.
3. Test connectivity first. Double check to make sure your gateway can reach at least one device on each subnet before you try to connect the rest.
4. Keep the pilot focused. Only include the devices you've selected for the pilot. Keep everything else out of the monitoring view and use maintenance mode to prevent unnecessary alerts as you set things up.
5. Agree on what success means. Put your pilot success criteria in writing and schedule a weekly check-in so that all stakeholders know what you're measuring and when you’re evaluating progress.
6. Bring security in early. In the pilot plan itself, name a security contact to avoid last-minute surprises with network access and approvals.

The Bottom Line: Make Your Pilot Prove Something

A successful pilot gives you enough information to decide whether the platform can make a real difference to your AV operations. That means choosing your pilot candidates carefully, measuring how problems were detected, how long they took to resolve, whether your team caught issues before users reported them, and how many site visits you avoided.

At Xyte, we help teams focus their pilots on the devices and rooms that matter most, with features like VIP room prioritization, maintenance mode, and access permissions down to the individual room. Once you've got your results, our ROI calculator can help translate them into a business case for a wider rollout.

Schedule a meeting to see Xyte in action and find out how to set up a pilot in your AV environment.

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