Being your own client

How we improve on our own operations

Every two weeks, we look back at our processes during a retrospective. The team gathers and names things that we should start, stop or continue doing. We use these learnings to optimise our projects, processes and more importantly our time. More time efficiently spend, means more time to create even better digital experiences. The retrospective helps us to rethink our processes into new ideas to work more efficiently with our clients and the team

The problems raised in the retrospective often circle around capacity and planning issues. To conquer these challenges, we brought together the project management and development team. Together, they created a fortune-telling capacity tool and a real-time narrowcasting for meeting rooms.

Tools used: Slack, Raspberry PI, Vue JS, Gripp, Forecast and Philips Hue.

Opportunity 2: unaware of booked meeting rooms
Ever since we moved to our new location we had been running into the issue of meeting rooms being booked. Team members present during the meeting were well aware of these meetings provided in their calendar, while other team members, looking for a quick tete-a-tete, were often unaware of the meeting taking place.

Our answer: Narrowcasting schedules
To provide the users of the meeting room with some context about upcoming events taking place we created an in-house narrowcasting application running on a small Raspberry Pi computer. By connecting the Raspberry Pi with a PIR Sensor — a PIR Sensor is a motion sensor that reacts on peoples movements — we are able to detect people coming in and leaving out to display relevant information onto a screen about any upcoming meetings and appointments. We also connected our Hue lightbulbs to the Raspberry Pi, enabling them to indicate an upcoming appointment by the use of light.

Our calendar is a living organism, meetings get moved and double bookings occur. Working with this dynamic feed of data, as well as connecting physical objects, posed quite a unique challenge. The team had to overcome unusual sets of inputs and outcomes in building the perfect narrowcasting solution.

How it works: The narrowcasting application combines data of our Google Calendar and displays it on the meeting room display. Using a PIR sensor in the room, the screen lights up when someone enters the room. If a meeting is about to end, the Hue lights turn orange and then red, indicating that another meeting is coming up in a few minutes.

Currently, we’re creating a similar application for Rialto Cinemas in Amsterdam. Instead of connecting Google Calendar, we built an API of ActiveTickets and display real-time ticket availability in the theater itself. Besides ticket information, Rialto can also showcase additional information about upcoming movies by filling it in their cms.

The next challenge
While we take great pride in realising the potential of our clients, we are projecting the same mindset within the team to come up with better solutions for occurring issues and problems. By doing so, we enhance our working flows and optimise on speed and performance, providing even better services to our clients.

Besides working on smaller side projects, the development team also keeps maintaining and improving on our own CMS with the feedback provided by its users. Being your own client means learning, researching, and expanding your knowledge about potential future implementations. At the same time, we’re creating a tool that’s not only being used by our fellow team members, but also by yourself.

If you feel like you have the next challenge for us to overcome, as either a fellow team member or client, please reach out, we are looking forward to meeting you! Look at our cases, or find our current vacancies here.