Akamai Empowers
R&D Team to
Drive Improvement with Real-Time Collaborative Learning

Challenge

Akamai Technologies is a global content delivery network, cybersecurity, and cloud services company, providing web and Internet security services. As a global technology leader, Akamai’s development and quality assurance teams wanted to improve their delivery quality and timelines by changing the way they worked. More importantly, the company wanted to empower developers with a better way to learn and improve their work. They already had learning routines in place. But those routines didn’t translate into solving repeating and inherent problems.

In addition to the agile methodologies the teams already had in place, which included a structure for reviewing past activities during retrospectives, they were looking for “something that would change employees’ mindset,” according to Aryeh Sivan, Senior Director of Engineering. “We had too many occasions where things weren’t running smoothly. As a manager, I can’t be everywhere all the time, and I knew that micromanaging was not the solution.”

Customer Profile

Solution

Akamai chose to implement the Shamaym real-time collaborative learning platform because it offered a tool managers and teams could use to improve results continuously while cultivating greater accountability. 

“You want each employee to act as a leader and have a sense of ownership,” explains Aryeh. “But it’s also important for managers to be part of the process. You want them to learn and lead by example.”

Aryeh especially liked that Shamaym gave him and his group a simple way to document and discuss issues as they arose, while they were still fresh in employees’ minds.

The teams started working with the Shamaym platform. They wrote debriefs after events that they deemed significant and high-impact.

Results

Akamai’s development and QA teams use Shamaym to capture their learning and share it across the team regularly. With Shamaym, team members can debrief important events in their work, view and comment on other team members’ learning, and assign action items to ensure follow up. Team members view hundreds of debriefs on Shamaym per month, with a monthly average of 15 debrief views per user, creating significant exposure to learning that team members would otherwise miss. 

This means that Akamai employees are more agile and more effectively collaborating across teams, sharing learnings and best practices more widely across the company. And it leads to results: In just three months, one squad saw a reduction of 86% in the average number of monthly incidents, and 60% in the average number of customer escalations.

Aryeh explains: “Shamaym allows everyone to take part in our retrospectives—including employees that did not normally participate—so now everyone benefits from our collective learning.”

Collaborative learning using the Shamaym platform creates the streamlined work processes that Aryeh hoped for, because even when issues do arise, there is more brain power and more organizational knowledge available to tackle them. 

But constant improvement doesn’t stop there: following these results, additional Akamai teams are now implementing the solution.

Higher Quality

0 %
fewer monthly incidents

Better Customer Satisfaction

0 %
fewer customer escalations

Employee Engagement

0
monthly debrief views per user

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Unleash the True Value of Collaboration​

How to build a team that lifts its members up to constantly drive better results.