Agency workers, lawyers and any other professional in the business of selling 'hours' to clients understand the process of logging time and how arduous it can be to do retrospectively after the day is done.
The winners of this weekend's Break.Make.Create hackathon, organised by agency Hello Computer, came up with a simple system that does not require employees to log hours after the day is complete but accurately records time while the employee is working.
The second annual Break.Make.Create hackathon took place in Johannesburg at the Digital Innovation Zone in Braamfontein, under the theme 'Nine to Five'. Participants were required to hack the daily grind, whether it be work, study or other, to come up with a solution within 24 hours that would make working life easier.
Competing against nine other teams from Wits, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and other agencies, The Guptas in Binary team scooped first place and prize money of R10 000.
"The winning team rallied hard," says judge Jonathan Deeb, executive creative director at FCB Johannesburg. "Anyone who works in an agency knows the frustration that is time logging; however, organisations know these timesheets are important as they allow them to report back and track profitability.
"The winning team came up with a really novel, consumer-centric way of doing that," says Deeb.
The Guptas in Binary came up with a Web-based app called Sidekick.
How Sidekick works:
1. The employee logs onto the system, and the number of assigned projects will be colour-coded and listed within the app.
2. When the employee sits down to work on a particular project, they lift up a colour card and hold it in front of the computer's web cam.
3. The web cam will pick up the colour and start logging time for that particular project.
4. Sidekick is also connected to the employee's smartphone and will pause time when the phone leaves the computer, accurately tracking when the employee is away from their desk.
5. Sidekick will let the employee know when they have reached the maximum amount of time allocated for that day for the particular project.
The runners-up were the Red Hot Techie Peppers from UJ. The team recently placed first in the Discovery Hackathon with a solution for health insurers to make sure gym-goers do not skip exercise. This time, the team developed an office automation system that allows workers to open doors, adjust heating and other things via hand gestures.
Organiser Wesley Loots said Hello Computer hopes to grow Break.Make.Create into the biggest hackathon in South Africa over the next three years and then to the biggest in Africa within seven years.
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