[Company Confidential] is a trusted provider of multilingual AI data services specializing in text and voice data generation, collection, and annotation. These services are supported by a complex data infrastructure that included quality metrics, task counts, complexity levels, user log-ins, language combinations, and onboarding statistics. Tens of thousands of data points are received multiple times daily to enable performance monitoring of 5000 freelance workers, across 50 languages.

After surpassing expectations during the pilot phase of a data annotation program, a request arrived to scale volumes up to 10x rapidly, without a precise forecast. With unpredictable work volumes and fluctuating demands, adaptability was crucial in ensuring the team’s ability to successfully meet customer requirements.

The team had previously achieved success through meticulous manual monitoring of each data category, each with its specific strategy. While it is understandable to approach an important opportunity with a hyper-focus on individual functions, such as requirement or productivity, or project management, this can result in the creation of disconnected solutions. The team was at risk of working in silos and inadvertently counteracting each other.

The team knew that the approach to ramp successfully, ensure high-quality service amid volume fluctuation, and avoid shifts in quality performance they had to be able to both strategize within individual functional areas and govern the system as a whole.

As a rapidly expanding organization, company leadership sought to balance the need for dedicate robust leadership on this client, with a priority to develop services across a vast portfolio. The team partnered with Animada Globalization to provide fractional leadership, granting the internal leadership space to focus on the many high-growth opportunities across the business.

As a first step, Animada partnered with data analysis to craft a relevant, accurate, and transparent data model that could be used across functional areas. We refined the data collection process and focused on gathering only what truly mattered for each functional area. We identified common thresholds and triggers to produce insights that improved overall comprehension of program performance and supported proactive decision-making at scale.

Next, Animada embedded with the program team, learned the ropes of the many different solutions in place, standardized approaches, and integrated processes into a coordinated operations model. Finally, we shifted the strategy from departmental to cross-functional goal-setting. Increased partnership in planning empowered the team to drive account growth  independently throughout the ramp up phase, with minimal guidance from leadership.

The solution supported the work of leadership, operational teams, and data analytics to scale rapidly while consistently surpassing customer delivery expectations in peak and low-volume periods. The forecasting model created will serve as a template across customer programs. By correlating each functional area’s performance, day-to-day execution and overall program understanding improved significantly. The team consistently met client requirements while partnering with the client to improve the program overall.The strengthened relationship prompted a request for continued volume increases and the addition of two new services.