Not a Trash Box

Inspiration

People are very creative creatures! More often than not, they have thoughts and improvements to offer. But if they share their ideas and they don’t get any feedback - they stop doing it over time... It is essential for company leaders to know that when their employees don’t give suggestions, it doesn’t mean they have nothing to say. Listening to employees is a significant way to help businesses grow so how companies can encourage their people to share ideas?

What it does

NotATrashBox application offers a way to gather employees' ideas, give them a voice to choose what’s important, and keep them constantly informed about the status of their reports. Suggestions supported by other colleagues, automatically go to the person responsible for analyzing them and pushing things further. The reporter gets a notification about each status change so he can track the progress. Thanks to the functionality to generate periodic reports with a summary of the best-implemented ideas, all employees can see how their workplace gets better!

How we built it

From the initial scope of the application (any kind of employee suggestion), we picked a single micro journey to use as a showcase of our application. In the first sprint, we created a basic case lifecycle and defined the building blocks of each stage. Then, every week, we picked a few blocks to work on in parallel and improve the application.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging constraint was "solely [...] App Studio". A lot of PEGA features we already knew were unavailable. The lack of data transform alone extended the time of implementing the voting mechanism by 8 man-days and the limitations of UI changes forced us to abandon really nice wireframes. A few times, we had to go a bit creative on replicating those existing features with only App Studio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A good estimation of the project timeline and restricting scope from day one. With limited time, picking a single user journey and creating mockups of everything else was the key to completing implementation on time to submit the entry for the hackathon. From the very start, prioritization was spot on and when we hit some technical complexities, we had enough flexibility to drop low-priority items and still close the work on time to submit the entry.

What we learned

There was a steep learning curve in the collaboration as most of the team have never worked together beforehand. The variety of the experience has benefited us greatly, but only during the first 2 sprints, we managed to timebox the exploratory discussions. Also, we gained enough proficiency with App Studio to implement UI feedback on the fly rather than iterate through the mockup-prototype-implementation cycle for every basic detail.

What's next for Not a Trash Box

Take the prototype for the spin within our professional networks and see if there is any demand before investing any additional effort. Due to licensing costs, we'll be targeting companies already using PEGA.