Entelect’s Technology Accelerator Programme is a huge hit

A Technology Accelerator project is a software project that must be developed to achieve a predefined outcome, for example to learn a new technology, showcase a framework, solve a business problem, complete a fully specified system or create a potential product. Employees are given time during working their week to work on their Technology Accelerator projects. They have the full support of Entelect senior managers and technical leads, who guide and mentor them through the process. Employees can also join forces and work together on single projects. Employees can join the programme at any time from the beginning of the year but the projects must be completed and ready to present to a judging panel by mid-October.

Judging this year was held at the African Pride Hotel in Melrose Arch, where renowned tech journalist Nafisa Akabor and TechHuman.com editor Brendon Ambrose joined the Entelect senior management judges – Shashi Hansjee (CEO), Yatish Parshotam (GM: Communications), Sheldon Lyne (GM: Operations) and Matthew Butler (GM: Projects). Each participant was given 15 minutes to present their projects and these projects were judged on technology innovation, complexity, completeness and quality of presentation, among other criteria. Scores were tallied and the results and prizes were handed out at Entelect’s year-end function at the Askari Lodge (https://www.entelect.co.za/News/DisplayNewsItem.aspx?niid=43012).

The winner of the best group project was handed to project “Beep” by Rishal Hurbans, Rushil O’Jageer and Ross Badenhorst, and the team took away a prize of R30,000 to share. Beep is a highly extensible notifications framework that provides real-time notifications of new content from various sources. The prize for the best individual project went to the Projects Dashboard, which is already used at Entelect HQ to track the health of the builds of our various projects. Duane McKibbin walked away with a prize of R15000. The second place prize of R10000 went to Grant Marais’ JavaScript music visualiser, Pulsar. All other participants received R1000 worth of 1Up points (Entelect’s internal rewards programme).