How Sugarwork helped Appen reduce onboarding time by 70%

Appen is a global leader in data for the AI Lifecycle, including data sourcing, annotation, and model evaluation, and a pilot customer of Sugarwork. We spoke to Mo Chahdi, Global VP of Employee Experience, about how the organization leveraged Sugarwork to capture and share institutional knowledge as it went through a restructuring process, and what kinds of organizational benefits he sees from working with the solution over the longer term.

Welcome, Mo! Maybe we can start with a little bit of background about the challenges faced by Appen and your role in overcoming them.

Sure! Without going into any sensitive details, our task was to do a rightsizing for the organization, which involved some staff cuts in our development team, and opening a new office in another market. My role covered a range of areas, including selecting an office, hiring new developers, setting up the legal entity and its financial structure, and so on.

Many of these tasks are quite straightforward. But the restructure also came with a challenge around knowledge transfer. While you can just hire new people and give them the task of figuring out what to do, that comes with risk and cost, in terms of potential errors, and a longer time to productivity. I was concerned that we didn’t have the infrastructure in place for knowledge transfer. So we worked with Sugarwork to help ensure a seamless knowledge transfer process.

Did you have a plan around knowledge transfer prior to working with Sugarwork?

We had a lot of assumptions around it. But in hindsight, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. In fact, the true breadth of what areas which teams worked on was kind of a black box, with no fully accurate way to understand what team X did versus what team Y did, and where the overlap and duplications were.

So actually, Sugarwork surfaced issues that we were not aware of, such as how one team was working in another area of the business, but it wasn’t formally documented and therefore wasn’t taken into account through the initial restructuring process.

On that note, can you talk us through how Appen leveraged Sugawork in more detail?

There were two key parts to how we leveraged Sugarwork. The first is the obvious use case; transferring knowledge from one engineer to another. This transformed the onboarding process for our new hires, reducing onboarding time by 70% and enabling our new team members to get up to speed with all the deep knowledge of the organization that could normally take months or even years to attain. So this was a very clear, direct, quantifiable win.

But the second part is perhaps more interesting from a strategic perspective. As mentioned, we didn’t fully realize our blind spots in terms of exactly what each individual and team was working on. Sugarwork enabled us to get a grip on what teams were working on, so we could make very objective, data-backed decisions about where to change things. From a company level, in my opinion this was of greater value even than the direct 1-1 knowledge transfer between the engineers.

Very interesting! Perhaps you can elaborate on this a little more — what do you think the value is of Sugarwork to the C-suite? What are the main use cases you see?

You can make an analogy of the unique knowledge that sits in an organization with DNA. Every organization has a unique code that makes it successful. But from a strategic perspective there is a constant challenge of how enterprises can protect and maintain their unique DNA code — the knowledge that sets them apart. How do you keep it relevant, up-to-date, agile? How do you ensure that you are not doing things the way you were five years ago simply because an expert who has left the company set things up this way?

Sugarwork can be leveraged quite broadly across these situations. On a use case level, this includes challenges such as efficiency; identifying where the overlaps and redundancies are in the organization. Or transforming the company to enter new markets is an intriguing one — organizations can leverage Sugarwork to understand where the relevant knowledge exists that can be applied to new markets. Onboarding and offboarding employees is a natural use case. And related to that, another compelling use case is reducing the time to productivity for new employees.

Can you talk us through how a new hire and organization would benefit in terms of time to productivity?

To take this hypothetical situation, how do new hires access the DNA code of the organization? For example if you look at the factors that speed up the time to productivity of a new salesperson in an enterprise, it includes things such as if she has the right leadership, the right people around her, and of course, access to all the data and information she needs, including understanding how to leverage internal contacts and resources and so on.

But in a siloed enterprise environment, what frequently happens is that it may take a year or even more for her to stumble on a situation where she realizes that the people who could help her solve a problem are in a team she doesn't usually work with. Now had she had that knowledge DNA of the organization made accessible to her when she joined, she would not have spent a year trying to connect the dots herself. That is an interesting opportunity cost.

Indeed. And finally, you have talked a lot about use cases, but do you see Sugarwork being able to unlock value on an ongoing basis?

Yes, one thing to reiterate is that from a strategic perspective, the main value of Sugarwork is not capturing the knowledge. Rather, it is understanding what it surfaces in terms of data. And then using data to drive decisions across the organization.

For example, Sugarwork comes in and collaborates on a specific issue around institutional knowledge transfer. Within the scope of this issue, the percentage of knowledge captured increases by several orders of magnitude.

But then you can look at the data that was captured and say, hey, now we spot all these other opportunities around improving efficiency, speeding up time to productivity, organizational transformation, entering new markets, or what have you. And you go from there. With this approach you can unlock value on an ongoing basis. That’s where the true value of Sugarwork lies for the enterprise.

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You can get more insights into how Appen worked with Sugarwork, including:

• The specifics of the challenge faced by Appen, including timelines and number of employees affected.

• The workflow and process of knowledge transfer with Sugarwork.

• The full scope of savings enabled by the collaboration.

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