Following the success of our first ever ShipIt day back in April, on the 6th and 7th of November we dropped everything in the office so we could focus on another ShipIt day!
What’s ShipIt day?
We took inspiration from one of our favourite software companies, Atlassian, who have some great information on how they run their ShipIt days. At Esendex, it’s 26 hours for all staff (not just our devs), to work on whatever they want – whether that’s to improve what’s already there or develop something completely new related to the business.
Why would we take time away from developing our core products and services?
Esendex is good at hiring smart people and we’d be mad to keep all that brain-power and creativity locked up. Everyone has something that bugs them about their daily work, our products, or something they’d like to see happen. All that aside, ShipIt days are part of the package that make Esendex a fun place to work!
26 hours later…
87 ideas were suggested at the brainstorm sessions prior to the event and 16 distinct projects were worked on during the 26 hours. Everyone’s hard work and enthusiasm certainly paid off – there were so many great ideas to present on Friday afternoon. Each team had 5 minutes to showcase their project and it was then up to the staff to vote for their favourite.
Voting was carried out by SMS – naturally. Team Anti-un-social claimed victory with their project that allowed admin users on an account to specify which days and times messages can be sent
We also had another award voted for by our CEO which went to the team from our Australian office. They built “the world’s greatest online self-serve pro forma tool known to man”.
To be continued…
After yet another successful ShipIt day, we’ve no doubt we’ll be running more in the near future. I’m sure we’ll be blogging about a number of these projects as they make their way into our products and services over the coming months.
