Deeson's Pixar-inspired Notes Day

As an agency we spend most of our time solving tricky problems for our clients.

But we also know that spending time tackling our own problems can mean huge benefits for our clients and team members.

Inspired by an idea from Pixar, we created a self-organised day to do just that.

We invited everyone to come up with ideas on the theme of "Make us Better". And, not being people who like to reinvent things for the sake of it, we called it "Notes Day".

Crowdsourced ideas

A month before the day, we asked for ideas for things that team members felt could make the agency better. Team members could then organise themselves into groups to work on the ideas they felt they wanted to contribute their time towards. We asked the team member who came up each the idea to be the project lead for the day.

Projects from Notes Day  

At the end of Notes Day the teams held a “show and tell” where they demonstrated what they’d accomplished during the day and talked about the next steps for their project. For example:

• Account manager Paula’s team did a walkthrough of what affects mental health at work, what they think we should do to help people have better mental health
• Our developer Kristiaan’s team talked about the different methods of deploying Drupal 8 builds through different hosting environments, tested out some approaches, found they didn’t work as they expected them to, came up with a better way
• Our designer Hannah and her team demonstrated a proof of concept for taking data from Officevibe (the system we use to get staff feedback) and presenting it in an infographic style

Below is a video demonstration of our solutions architect Mori’s project: exploring different user interfaces for Continuous Integration server deployment tools, he built an interface using the game Minecraft - meet DrupalCraft!