Internal day: Creating value for our Clients

Once a month, the 93digital team down our tools, and stop working on our clients’ projects. We call these an Internal day, as the focus is on ourselves and our development as a company.

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The work we do on our Internal day can be around one particular issue, such as last month when we invited Alan Chapman from CRO agency Host to train us on the intricacies of Conversion Rate Optimisation.

It gives 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.

This month, there was more of a free thought element to the day in that it 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

Coupling an upcoming (top secret -shh) marketing campaign involving data visualisation, with a gap in knowledge of animation tools, the design, and marketing team decided to test a new tool called Principle, test it’s functionality and get equipped on how it could benefit our clients and ourselves in the future.

With a limited timeframe for a proof of concept, our designer Cedrine spent a couple of hours first learning how to use Principle before giving it a test run. Cedrine used some previous sketches she had made of the team and married the concept of data visualisation to incorporate some rather irregular statistics about various members of the team.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Tackling the overall delivery process might seem like an overwhelming task for only one day, but that’s what the project management 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

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. Enabling simpler Instagram feed posts for clients that have requested this, Creating and submitting new plugins to WordPress.org, simplifying code in order to save development time and updating our plugins and responding to the WordPress community of any questions they have on the work. All of which improves our capability to service the client, and increases our standing in the WordPress community, whilst bettering ourselves as individuals.

Tomorrow’s post will provide tangible evidence and showcase the results and benefits, from our latest Internal day.