TuckShop & Dilbert – Things we like to show off
Q: What do we do while at work?
A: We build mobile and web apps.
Q: What do we do for fun?
A: We build mobile and web apps. Yes, we are boring like that 🙂 Tuckshop and Dilbert are our internal apps that we have built for ourselves and use everyday.
Tuckshop – As the name suggests it’s our own shop where we stock all kinds of junk and health food. Numerous types of chocolates, candies, cookies, cakes, chips, juices, aerated and non aerated drinks, fruits, salad, Maggi (How happy we were when it came back to the market!), popcorn, soup, sandwiches. Anything that catches our fancy. The odd days when we had pastries or boiled corn (With butter!) or freshly cut pineapple. And the best part, it is all on the house. The fridge is always stocked, the Tuckshop is always loaded.
So where does the app come in? Well, there is the boring part of running the Tuckshop where we have to manage inventory and stock, reconcile usage data with consumption. Also, you need some kind of checks and balances to prevent misuse of the perk. And so we went and built an app for our Tuckshop.
We have Android and iOS versions and Tuckshop is the most used app on some of our team members’ phones (right after Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram).
We are trying to convince a local supplier to integrate with our Tuckshop API so we don’t have to call him to replenish stock. That, and gifting are the two features we hope to add soon.
Dilbert – Dilbert is cheekily named after the comic strip. We knew we did not want to build a workplace that imposes unnecessary rules and restrictions on our team members. At the same time, with an office of 35+ people, you do need minimal processes. Also, as a services company, we need some flavor of time sheets to bill clients accurately and fairly.
Dilbert is our attempt at managing one of the most sensitive topics in any organization – measuring effort and quality. It is a work in progress system, and we keep tweaking it to suit our changing needs.
We built our own Gtalk bot, and it does away with the need for having to manually punch in or create time sheets. Dilbert (the Gtalk bot), based on your presence, auto updates your daily logs. Thanks to Dilbert, we have flexi hours at Ajency.in. We completely did away with the concept of office hours and instead moved to a weekly log of effort. Everyone is free to choose when they begin and end work, how long their breaks should be and how frequent.
Along with measuring effort, we now get data/charts on time spent on features vs bugs, client A vs client B, meetings vs learning. All this data helps us identify the problem areas and measure the effectiveness of our work processes.
Both Dilbert and Tuckshop are also being piloted at a couple of other startups/organizations. We are excited that our side projects have value for others as well.