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As the use of Appian becomes more widespread across different groups, teams and divisions of your organization, the impact of siloed or lost knowledge can lead to project delays, lost opportunities for reuse or even having teams ‘reinvent the wheel’. When your Appian program expands, so too should your knowledge sharing efforts. Even simple search tools and sharing practices can help combat the $31.5B that the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose roughly a year due to poor or non-existent knowledge sharing.
But, it’s not just about sharing knowledge. Getting the most out of your efforts requires tailoring your investments to maximize your benefits. This guide will review best practices for knowledge sharing and scaling knowledge sharing practices. Before going further, let’s start with two important definitions:
The act of exchanging information or understanding between individuals, teams, departments, or organizations. It can occur asynchronously or synchronously depending on the type of knowledge being shared and via different mediums. In the context of a growing Appian practice, commonly used sharing mechanisms include dedicated chat rooms and spaces, folder drives with reusable resources, ‘lunch & learns,’ or other forms of dedicated meeting.
Takes a variety of forms such as insights gained from experience or explicit practices such as processes, how-to’s, and other documentation. Ultimately, it’s any sort of information that is useful for driving success and worth transferring from one group to another. For Appian, this frequently includes successful use cases, development or project management best practices, common pitfalls, and lessons learned.
The cost of poor knowledge sharing is easily overlooked but adds up when employees waste time searching for information or reinvent the wheel. If your organization is just getting started, expect barriers at the individual, cultural and technical levels.
A study from the Panopto Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report found that the average worker wastes 5.3 hours every week either waiting on vital information from a colleague or recreating existing institutional knowledge. As such, organizations must also incentivize good knowledge sharing behavior and make it easy and rewarding for employees by investing in training, technology, and recognition.
Benefits from effective knowledge sharing include improved collaboration, productivity, and innovation. Additionally, effective knowledge sharing practices help build a positive corporate culture, improve employee morale and mitigate costs of lost knowledge and “brain drain."
Investments in knowledge sharing should be appropriately tailored to the scale of your Appian program, balancing costs versus potential benefits. The most successful organizations think of knowledge sharing as a journey and realize they don’t need to invest in ‘advanced’ knowledge sharing practices right from the start. However, the greater the scale of Appian activities, the more benefits there are in formalizing knowledge sharing practices.
Based on a knowledge sharing maturity framework by TSIA, the table below offers a simplified overview of activities and Appian-relevant stepping stones to help assess and mature your knowledge sharing practices.
At this stage, Appian activities are spread across a few teams supporting multiple applications. Knowledge sharing practices focus on documentation, encouraging informal collaboration across teams and sponsoring a variety of ad-hoc activities dedicated to information and practice sharing.
AVP of Automation, North America Financial Services Company
Appian’s footprint is across multiple teams managing multiple applications, at least some of which are business-impacting if they suffer an outage. At this level, there is increased emphasis on standardizing & routinizing knowledge sharing practices with formal incentives to encourage sharing behavior.
Additionally, we suggest product owners earn their Certified Scrum Product Owner certification from the Scrum Alliance.
Appian Overview: Product owners may benefit from our Appian Overview training in order to better understand the terminology and capabilities of Appian.
Appian Foundations: If the product owner is more heavily involved with the day-to-day work of the development team, as in the case of a project manager, then the Appian Foundations course is recommended. The course provides a healthy amount of our suggested delivery methodology, including topics such as application planning, translation of requirements into application components, and leveraging low-code tools for creating design documents and proofs of concept.
The analyst’s job is to help the product owner convert the needs of the business into actionable backlog items. It’s best to look for someone with strong communication and presentation skills, so as to better facilitate an open dialogue between team members. Additionally, analysts should excel at problem solving and be familiar with Appian terminology. To better assist in requirements gathering, analysts should have some basic training in planning, testing and designing low-code applications.
"One internal role that has a lot of the same skills required to be successful on Appian projects are the ‘power’ report users. I found them across our business analytics teams. They have a mix of technical and business skills that fit well with the Appian framework"
Appian Platform Owner, Global Engineering Firm
A common task an analyst must perform is choosing the most appropriate automation tool for a project or workflow. Whether that’s an integration, decision object, or robotic process automation (RPA), analysts must be well-versed with the capabilities and terminology of the Appian low-code platform to make these decisions. For this reason, some organizations (including Appian) nominate a developer on the team to fill the analyst role. While it’s acceptable to keep the roles of analysts and developers separate, it’s important that both are sufficiently trained on the Appian platform.
If you plan on using your developers as analysts, then the background criteria is the same as for low-code developers. If you’re looking for a non-developer to fill the analyst role, then we’ve found the following criteria to be helpful:
Appian Foundations: Provides the tools to follow Appian’s suggested methodology, speak the language of developers, and write better requirements for applications.
Appian Certified Analyst: Helps validate the knowledge and skills required to work alongside Appian developers.
"One mistake we made when first starting out was just trying to find people with past Appian experience. What we found out was that finding, either internally or externally, the people with the right competencies and then teaching them about Appian was the better approach."
Appian Platform Owner, Fortune 500 Insurance Firm