Internal Day: the results and conclusions

In the last post, we mentioned the reasons why ClarityDX value our monthly Internal day.

In essence, we believe that the need to constantly improve ourselves is a valuable asset for our clients as it means that personal development and improving your skill set – vital company characteristics – are never on the client dime. Let’s recap the challenges set by each team for themselves to complete by the end of the Internal day.

Design: The design team aimed to have started mastering a new illustration tool, and prepare for an upcoming data visualisation marketing campaign by ‘tooling up’, in a fun yet informative way.

Project Management: PM’s had lofty aims of tackling the bottlenecks that occur in the overall delivery process. might seem like an overwhelming task for only one day, but that’s what the PM team decided to try out. They were especially focusing on delivering improved support, setting up a new ticketing system and managing our early life support processes.

Development: Enabling simpler Instagram feed posts for clients, creating and submitting new plugins to WordPress.org, simplifying code in order to save development time, were some of the implementations, that had been planned.

The Results

Design: As mentioned, the design team wanted to give the tool Principle a test run, the reasoning being that every time we have been in front of clients and shown them any design mockups, there is almost always an appetite to see it coming to life in an animated way prior to development beginning. Just from this quick initial test video our designer Cedrine created, it is significantly easier to visually prototype designs and data in a more interactive and digestible format.

@p_cedre's first attempt at learning how to visualise and animate data, using @principleapp, an interactive animation tool for UI Designers. Part of the training we do on our Internal days. #uidesign #animation pic.twitter.com/nzpbU4LLe6

— 93digital® (Now part of Clarity) (@93digitalUK) March 27, 2018

The results speak for themselves, and the design team now feel more confident in being able to deliver the sort of work.

Project Management: There were, many furrowed brows throughout the day as redesigning the way multiple departments interact with each other and plan how improvements to our delivery process can be implemented. As anyone managing large, complex projects with many moving parts will tell you, a well planned and optimised process can limit pain points. The result of the PM’s internal day work was a beautiful spreadsheet of our entire delivery process, with an overview of how ClarityDX will improve delivery moving forwards across all of our project stages: detail, discovery, design, development and deployment.

Development: Simplifying code, creating and submitting new plugins to WordPress, or enabling an easier Instagram feed integration with a website, might on their own all seem minor, however, all of these will vastly improve our capability to serve our clients in the long term in a faster and more efficient manner. The results from the development team will stem from the accumulative hours saved from one line of code per activity, rather than multiple lines of code, despite having previously built the exact same feature somewhere else.

To conclude in an academic fashion, our monthly Internal day is clearly beneficial to all and sundry. For our clients, there is the knowledge that their web design agency is constantly striving to improve, which will reflect on their work, and for the people that work at ClarityDX, they know that there will be the support to benefit their personal development, an increasingly important aspect of career fulfilment.

We’re always trying to innovate and create new things that empower client results. Let us know if you would like to hear more about these projects.