Internal day: January 2020

Once a month, the ClarityDX team stop working on our clients projects and run an internal training and innovation day. Internal days ensure that we are always improving, both individually and as teams by allowing us to find efficiencies and drive forward innovation outside of client projects. Here is how our first internal day of 2020 unfolded…

In the morning, each team set a number of goals and deliverables for the day:

• Project Management: Graham, Roz, and Ellie will be leading the discussion on advancing the structure for client ‘kick-off’ sessions to improve the discovery phase for our clients, and ultimately save time.
• Design: Charlie and Nicola are working alongside our project management team to create a more systematic approach to our discovery and definition phases by developing a workshop format to help clients with aligning content, UX and design. The team will also look to gain more consistency across some internal branding. Just before lunch, Fenella will also be sharing a presentation with the ClarityDX team on some of the key insights from the Web Page UX Design course she recently attended by the NN Group.
• Development: Andrew will be optimising some standard templates for our WordPress starter theme with a focus on archive pages while Vic will start rebuilding our internal PHP post archive filtering class to create efficiencies and improve quality. Jafar will be looking at converting standard ACF modules into Gutenberg blocks. Matt will be looking at improving and updating our technical discovery document. Ibon will be creating some helper functions for our starter theme.
• Digital Strategy: Darren is set to be working on the templates for some of our decks, and crafting a blog post focused on how to optimise your key word searches.

By lunch, the objectives were beginning to be met, and pizza was ordered. Just before we dived into the pizza, Fenella ran some of the wider ClarityDX team through her key insights and some interesting stats from the Web Page UX Design Course by the Nielsen Norman Group. Following which, Graham, our Project Director shared his take on recent Agile training.

As the afternoon came to a close, our wider ClarityDX team shared the outcome of their deliverables for the day:

• Project Management: After initial research the team created a plan to update our ‘kick-off’ questionnaire, making the process easier for our clients while producing more information for our teams going into the discovery phase.
• Design: The design team focused on improving our internal document branding and preparing graphics that are all set for animation at the next stage…
• Development: As our developers set to work, we had a lot of progress across all fields. We had new templates created for both post archives and search results to be used with our WordPress theme, saving time in development phase for our clients. A new google maps block was created which can be expanded and incorporated into sites which have a Google Map embedded. We also updated our internal Technical Discovery document and began rebuilding our internal filtering class to try and reduce down from 1600 lines of code! A number of new functions were added to our starter theme such as a custom data dumper function for the developers to use during development.
• Digital Strategy: Darren updated our internal deck templates and created a fresh blog post article on conducting B2B SEO keyword research – a blog post coming to ClarityDX this week.