How Long is the Munich Pilot Phase, Really?

Munich started out their ambitious Linux migration with a "pilot phase". In June of 2004, Munich IT chief Wilhelm Hoegner declared the pilot phase "a success":

"The pilot project was approved last year and was a success; the official green light for a wide range of tenders was given recently. We would like to have completed all the projects by 2008."

But then in September, 2005, the pilot phase was extended:

The migration of 14,000 desktops from Windows NT 4.0 to Linux and Microsoft Office 97 and 2000 to OpenOffice.org was originally planned to start in 2005, but the schedule has slipped, Peter Hofmann, the project leader of the migration, said Monday.

Note that the extension of the pilot phase was not announced until 2005 was almost over. The migration was supposed to have already been going on throughout 2005, but apparently that was not successful, so they pushed it out another year into 2006.

So finally, in September, 2006, the city claimed again that the pilot phase was successful and the real migration would start, for real this time.

But things did not go well. Between September 2006 and November 2008 the city only managed to migrate 1,400 desktops.

Now it sounds like they are returning to pilot phase, but they have decided to call it "development nucleuses":

Another great success of 2008 was our strategy to establish more and more development nucleuses, that means small units within a department, which migrated to our linux base client. We no longer tried to cover a department as whole, but to go on step by step, gathering experiences and improving both sides - the base client and the people managing the service for the users.

So after more than five years of working on the migration, with a budget of millions and a team of twenty technicians and project leaders, Munich is still in the pilot phase of the migration.

In the real world a pilot phase is used to determine the feasibility of a project. If the pilot phase is unsuccessful, the project is scrapped. Munich does it differently, though. If the first and second pilot phases are not successful, they just start another pilot phase.