Last week (Friday 5th August), BiP Solutions held its first ever “Innovation Day”. The day was dedicated to providing staff with the chance to collaborate, disrupt old ways and create something new to help address problems and improve performance and productivity within the company, as well as improving services to customers.

Staff were invited beforehand to submit ideas for problems and processes they wanted to improve and ideas for addressing those issues. Many great ideas were put forward, and after much debate and deliberation, three areas were chosen to focus on for the day:

• Developing a product to improve Cyber Essentials processing and increase integration with Salesforce
• Finding ways of enabling staff to evidence their achievements throughout the year, record performance reviews and track career progression
• Attempt to create a content aggregator to collect news around B2G marketing or innovation in the Public Sector from different sources automatically

New Ideas

Teams were assigned to work on and present new and innovative solutions to address each of the challenges, from conception through to a basic implementation of a product. The aim of was to find the origin of a brilliant idea for a future BiP internal app or customer facing product.

The day flew by and was a great success as everyone involved threw themselves into the day and took the opportunity to ideate and develop new ideas for improving their working process and the customer experience.

Collaboration

Innovation Day was the brainchild of BiP’s Head of Software engineering (and resident wine connoisseur) Alvaro Sanchez, who explained the reasoning and inspiration for the day:

“I’ve worked on similar days like this before at previous companies, but they tended to be more technically-focused, so we wanted to focus this day on product development, which would allow more areas of the company to get involved, and make it more fun.”

“We also wanted to give staff the chance to work on different projects from their usual day-to-day work, and enable staff from teams who wouldn’t always work closely with each other to collaborate and pool their knowledge and experience to create new ideas and solutions, and allow them to play with technology, try different things, new frameworks and new approaches.”

“It was a really good day, everyone had a lot of fun and were very passionate about the improvements they wanted to make. We’ll definitely look to do this again in the future, maybe even expand it to a week or a month to allow more time for people to develop their ideas in more detail and gives us more margin to change approach, but I’m very happy with how the day went.”

Alvaro Sanchez, Head of Software Engineering

Future innovation

Going forward, BiP’s technical brains will use the key findings and insights from Innovation Day to further develop those ideas generated and turn them into finished products, keeping BiP at the cutting edge of technical innovation.

Thanks again to everyone who organised and took part in the event, and we can’t wait to do it all again soon.