- Communications
Case Study: Scaling Learning To Keep Up With Growth
Specialized teams are the heart of any organization. More often than not, how far any company will go is dependent on the skills of its teams. For one fast-growing analytics software firm, the company’s own in-house team of developers is one they’d happily pit against any other for technical aptitude. But that wealth of know-how, in turn, has presented senior leaders with an important question:
How can we ensure a brilliant team of experienced software developers always knows every aspect of our product architecture in full detail, especially as the product suite and the development team both rapidly expand?
Answering that question was an internal team charged with supporting employee learning and development (L&D) for all of the company’s developers. 
It was no small task — this is the team responsible for maintaining and enhancing the technical architecture development at the very heart of the business — they design and develop the software solutions the company sells. And as the company continues to grow, those solutions are only getting bigger, more disparate, and more complex.
And all of that, in turn, means that this small L&D team is constantly working to solve three critical business challenges:
- Ensure that every member of the development team completely understands every facet of the product — from the core functionality to the newest features — inside and out, both now and in the future as new features are added;
- Find enough technically capable new hires to accommodate the organization’s exponential growth, and then getting all those new team members up to speed on an incredibly complex technical solution within a target of 30 days; and
- Enable the developers to share their technical expertise with other business units, ensuring that members of the customer service and product sales organizations, among others, always have up-to-the-minute product knowledge.
The company had already explored wikis and other means to curate organizational knowledge — but with a fast-moving product cycle and a host of new hires trying to make sense of technical architecture documentation, those solutions weren’t quite enough to help the development team absorb new information quickly. And having built a business around a product that helps people better see and understand data, the L&D team felt it was important both culturally and tactically to find a solution that could scale their training efforts and allow them to leverage the power of visual learning.
“We have so much information to share,” notes a member of the company’s employee training team. “We’re tasked with conveying to our coworkers everything they need to know and understand in order to do their jobs — and often in a very short period of time.”
With that in mind, the team narrowed their search and began looking for a tool that could help them use video for knowledge sharing. Specifically, they needed a flexible solution for capturing formal training presentations as well as informal learning videos, and a video content management system that would make it easy to finding knowledge stored inside videos.
They soon found Panopto’s enterprise video platform.
Panopto makes it easy to record, share, and search video in a single solution that runs on any laptop. With Panopto’s video platform, business users can record video with virtually any camera and automatically upload recordings to a secure corporate video portal where they can be shared, viewed, and searched from any device.
Visual Data Meets Visual Training
To support the company’s incredible growth and create a solution to the company’s key business learning challenges, the developer training team began using Panopto to introduce a new means of knowledge curation — formal and informal video training that would reach across departments and divisions.
Today, that video knowledge sharing practice takes many forms across the organization, built upon four strategic pillars:
- Formal technical product training created and shared within the development team
- Informal knowledge sharing created by the developers themselves to communicate with each other
- On-demand product training created by the developers to communicate with the sales and customer support teams
- Formal knowledge sharing that connects developers to the company and its mission
Rather than develop individual systems for each of these needs, Panopto’s video platform enabled the company to address all four of those pillars in a single solution. Anyone inside the development team with knowledge to share can simply open the Panopto recorder on their laptop, click record, and present. Panopto takes care of all the technical AV work automatically, making the resulting video ready to share with anyone, anytime, anywhere, almost instantly.
To make sure Panopto would be the answer they needed, the company first started with an incremental rollout of the video platform. The team introduced Panopto as a one-way training tool — trainers and select internal experts were given access to record presentations, which could then be viewed by any member of the team.
This small-scale introduction served two purposes: first, to pilot the video learning concept and ensure it would meet the information sharing needs of the organization as hoped. And second, it would give the company the opportunity to collaborate with Panopto to ensure the tool integrated with internal identity management systems. This piece was critical to providing employees with access to Panopto via single sign-on, and to ensuring that the wealth of competitively sensitive information within Panopto would be secure.
A Learning Solution That Scales
After implementing single sign-on, the company began working with Panopto to test the video platform across all four of the learning challenges the company sought to tackle. As these tests succeeded, the company expanded its deployment of Panopto, bringing full recording and viewing capabilities to every member of the development team.
With Panopto installed on each team member’s PC, anyone could launch the software with the click of a mouse, record their computer screen, record from their laptop webcam or any other recording device, and then instantly share the recording from a secure video content management system (video CMS).
Panopto’s video CMS is a YouTube alternative in which employees can search and view any presentation a colleague has recorded. And because Panopto automatically transcodes every video in the library for playback on any device, employees can catch up on training, the latest product updates, and more from their smartphones, tablets, or anywhere else, whenever the time is right for them.
The company’s L&D team easily sets employee permissions, ensuring that folders are appropriately shared or kept private as needed, that new employees are swiftly ushered into the system, and that exiting employees are automatically removed to ensure the resources remain secure.
Scaling Employee Training With Video On Demand — Download The Full Case Study
See how this cutting edge organization found a single solution to support its four employee training goals and also enable the organization to continue its rapid grow.