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SMEs onsite training. Best practices and materials

The best practices described are validated on onsite SMEs training with the timeline 1 week, group of 20 Subject Matter Experts and 2 Data Analysts. The business case was IE from 10 different document types with complicated cross-document dependencies and integration with third-party systems.

1. Investigate business logic

Study business logic of the documents, find out corner cases, prepare a list of questions to SMEs to discuss on calls or on onsite meeting (see the example below).

2. Prepare for training

1. Prepare the training plan. See the example below.

Make sure that the following topics are covered during the training:

• What is WorkFusion product, what is the benefit and impact of its usage for SMEs in their daily work.
• High-level workflow and solution of the business process being implemented.
• Data Analyst role and SME role on the project.
• WorkSpace application and its tools.
• Tagging rules.
• Bad OCR.
• Business logic of the documents, document workflow and corner cases.

2. Prepare manual (qualification) tasks for all document types, review and prepare input data.
3. Plan and negotiate with the customer the number of SMEs that will take part in the training.

3. Work with the group

It's essential to set up work in the group in a proper way - to distribute roles and responsibilities, create communication channels and encourage team members to participate in the discussions and raise questions and issues that can influence business logic or solution design.

• Get acquainted with the group, try to distinguish the leaders who can help you teach others and establish contact with them.
• Create and announce daily plan to the team, set up the priority of the tasks.
• Set up scheduled Q&A sessions, provide feedback on mistakes.
• Provide the team with the tips and tricks at hand in the form of a printout.
• Avoid risks of team disconnection, change document types or activity when people are bored, encourage them interact and teach each other, raise and highlight the connection of their task with their daily work.
• Build communication channels, sources of truth and information and establish the order of team interaction.
• Create instructions based on business logic discussed and typical mistakes and provide the team with it.
• Create a tracker to follow and report the tagging speed and the number of task SMEs submitted.

4. Use the following materials

Use this archive for learning materials.

5. Tips and best practices

1. Remember that dress code and certain security requirements can be required on prem.
2. Keep in mind and transmit indirectly the message that you regard SMEs as experts in their sphere.
3. Make sure everything discussed and decided is taken down.
4. Walk around and ask for questions and propose assistance while tagging exercises.
5. Make sure the knowledge on business logic received is transmitted to the rest team working on project.
6. Ask SMEs to write down all the suggestions/feedback they have during the day and collect by the end of the day.
7. Before asking any questions to the customer, or committing to a certain solution make sure you're aligned with your own team in this approach.
8. Make sure all the changes decided are applied timely.
9. Stick to the plan but keep in mind what and how can be rearranged due to internal or external reasons.
10. Distribute responsibilities between Data Analysts If there is a Data Analyst team working onsite.