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Automating Secret Santa with DriveWorks

Secret Santa Goes Digital

At DriveWorks we automate a lot of our business processes with our very own DriveWorks software. There’s not much that we haven’t automated.

We have a whole dashboard of Internal Projects that help us manage different aspects of day to day life at DriveWorks.

The dashboard includes DriveWorks projects for…

  • Booking our annual leave
  • Ordering our DriveWorks branded clothing
  • Managing permissions in the DriveWorks Community
  • Planning DriveWorks World
  • Submitting Expenses
  • Ordering fish & chips
  • Gathering new employee details
  • Requesting Virutal Machines
  • Generating Licenses
  • Creating Purchase Orders
  • And even an Internal Project for submitting enhancement requests to improve Internal Projects!

Our Internal Projects help our company to run smoothly, automating mundane, repetitive tasks so that we can focus on what matters – creating great software and making our customers and resellers happy.

There is one other important side to what we do too, making sure our team is happy. December is a very busy month for us as a team so we like to plan some festive activities to bring everyone together and have fun.

One of the activities we organise is Secret Santa. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the concept. A budget is set and everyone is given a colleague to buy a present for. Then the gifts are anonymously distributed.

Gone are the days when all names are pulled from a hat, and you could potentially pick out your own name!

This year, Santa has gone digital thanks to DriveWorks!

Here’s how it works…

A Secret Santa icon appeard inside our Internal Projects dashboard.

This took us to the brand new Secret Santa project.

Inside the project we could write our letter to Santa, listing 4 things we’d like to receive and 4 things we’d prefer not to receive. This list will help our Santa do their shopping.

At 3pm on Friday, November 29th, Santa applications closed and DriveWorks randomly assigned everyone with someone to buy a gift for.

The clever rules in the back end of DriveWorks made sure there were no duplicates and that no two people would end up buying for each other.

DriveWorks also automatically emailed every Santa, giving them the name of the person they’re buying for, and their list of likes and dislikes. Check the email below, DriveWorks managed to do all of this in just one minute!

Since then we’ve all been busy hunting for the perfect gift!

Some gifts have already started appearing under the Christmas Tree. We will be distributing them on Friday afternoon with coffee and mince pies.

Check back on our blog for photos and see what gifts we’ve received from our Santas!

Merry Christmas!