July’s Internal Day: Creating Value

One day, each month, the team at ClarityDX down tools from client projects in order to experiment with new tools, processes and future trends in the digital space. The end goal is to improve the agencies’ capabilities, thus providing our clients with better value for money – this is July’s Internal day

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Internal days give us built-in time to reflect on how we can improve our service and team collaboration, whilst not eating into client project time. Importantly, it allows us an opportunity to be creative – we can try out ideas, build prototypes, explore new technologies, improve processes, try out new services, create internal comms ideas or design something that improves the way we work.

On the last internal day, if you recall, the Design & Marketing departments decided to test a new tool called Principle, the project management team were setting up a new ticketing system and managing our early life support processes and the development team were enabling simpler Instagram feed posts for clients that had requested this and created and submitted new plugins to WordPress.org.

July’s Internal day began with a quick brainstorm  across the departments (Development, Project Management, and Design & Marketing) on things that they wanted to work on, before sharing with the rest of the agency on how this will be approached, and what the desired outcome would be at the end of the day.

Design & Marketing:

The design team is losing one member, and gaining a new one today with Cedrine leaving and Charlie arriving so much of July’s internal day has been in the form of a handover between these two. Doing this on an internal day means that we do not eat into our client’s design time. The Marketing team have been crafting two meticulously wordy entries for the prestigious DADI Awards, thrilled to be able to share some of our client work with a wider audience.

Project Management:

The PM’s were finishing off the creation of a new internal process for clients’ migration of content. The project management team are defining a new internal process for clients handing over content to our project teams for when a site is ready to be populated with company content. This is because there can sometimes be confusion during a project as to who is accountable for providing content at which time, and this is something that can be avoided, providing everyone involved with infinitely less stress.

Development:

All of the developers did what developers do. They congregated, then decided to all work on separate pieces of functionality, to create a whole, ultimately worth more than the sum of its parts. They are preparing for the impending arrival of the Gutenberg editor by testing it out in the most complex conditions currently possible so that when Gutenberg goes live, we will be able to provide our clients with the most premium solutions straight from the get-go.

Internal day Results:

Design & Marketing:

The design team experienced a smooth hand-over of remaining tasks between Cedrine and Charlie, and the Marketing team managed to finish the award applications and started to create new blog post content.

Project Management:

After two internal days, the team have come up with a formalised process document, which will help our clients with content migration. They have hypothetically arranged this using a new client that will have a project kick-off next week. This will save both parties immense amounts of time, and reduce any potential stress in a new, burgeoning relationship.

Development:

Up until very recently, all talk around Gutenberg has been purely theoretical. However, now it is possible to play around inside it and create custom blocks so that’s what the Dev team did! The day ended with a lively discussion about the pros and cons of Gutenberg, with regards to ease of use and comparisons with other similar methods of editing content.

In short, July’s Internal day is clearly beneficial. 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.