On the 6th and 7th of November we collaborated with our other international offices to compete in our company-wide ShipIt day!
What is ShipIt day?
It’s a 26 hour period where all of our staff get into teams and start being inventive. It’s a time set aside to work on any ideas that we may not be able to work on in normal hours. We can work on anything that may improve our products and services. It’s is also known as a Hack Day or Hackathon, made famous by companies like Facebook and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general.
Why have a ShipIt day?
Our company is full of innovative people, and ShipIt day provides an opportunity for that quality to flourish. The strict time deadlines make everyone work together proactively and efficiently, building up teamwork capabilities and time-management skills. ShipIt day nurtures completely outside-the-box ideas, which could have enormous potential to improve our business on the whole. Without that special time set aside it would hard for these ideas to come to fruition. And, it’s fun!
How does it work?
87 ideas were suggested during a group brainstorm session prior to the event, and 16 projects were chosen to be pursued in the time frame of ShipIt day. Projects were presented on Friday (the 7th of November in the UK). Naturally, given the time difference between us and the UK, some after regular business hours sessions were in order, with pizza and beer of course. Each team working on a project was given five minutes to present ideas to all staff members, before a vote was taken to determine the best project.
What projects did you come up with?
Team “anti-un-social” (pictured above) from the UK claimed victory with their project which allowed admin users on an account to specify which days and times messages are allowed to be sent. Other great ideas included an on-call system to automatically generate the contact details of the staff member on-call at any time to help with any problems a customer may face. As well as a system to make message log files easier to access and search, making it simpler and quicker to identify any problems.
What we’re pretty ecstatic about is our own contribution, which was our CEO’s favourite! Our project was to create a Pro forma invoice generator to make the purchasing process for messages and other services even easier for our customers and ourselves.
It’ll be interesting to see some of these ideas get worked into our daily operations as we continue striving to improve our products and services through events like ShipIt day, and other collaborative efforts.
Prachi Bametha
Marketing Coordinator, Esendex Australia