Why Hackathon's in Organisation ?

A hackathon (hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which engineers and others collaborate intensively on some 'out of box idea' or 'problem' - to come-out with working prototype or code sample which can be taken up in future as solution.

Today we had successful Hackathon in our company. It was tremendous output we had after 24 hours of energy spend by engineers. Though the idea was in mind of teams from almost few weeks ago. Engineers started finding out the real problems what can help us. What idea to choose, what are possible solutions etc.

Final output: Team need to present the idea along with working prototype & vision.

I felt its like freelancing act you are doing for 24hrs where you get flavour of mini startup for a day. "Agile mode"

For a Day everyone feels like Co-Founder, CTO, Architect, Developer, Designer, Tester, Program Manager, Scrum Master.

How Hackathon helps

• Let everyone become 'owner' for 24 hrs like startup stakeholders. Everything should be perfect & all showcase use case should be working.
• It helps to bring the creativity from every level & you try to contribute to every stage of SDLC.
• Healthy competition & winning sprint.
• More gelling of multiple folks, kind of making wonderful squads on the fly.
• Throw your organisation problems - you will get wonderful quick solutions which can be worked upon for longer run.
• Helps organisation to realise the talent they have which was not properly used.
• Let express everyone - what they can do best to organisation given a chance.
• Great exposure to making idea presentation & presenting them.

Key findings in our Hackathon

• Junior guys produced really out of box & cutting edge technology idea(s).
• Some team solved the problems which they faced from customer - really quick poc in 24 hrs.
• Folks who we never thought will do something like this also able to do an idea end to end.

Frequency of Hackathon

Ideally 1 or 2 a year is good way to do plan hackathons. As every successful hackathon needs money & time. You need to do balance between both. Hence after hackathon you need to make sure those idea(s) are properly captured & should be backlogged in management backlog. Before next hackathon, most of idea(s) should be prioritised & planned as next hackathon will generate another set of ideas. Company should be able to digest first set of ideas.

Conclusion

In Hackathons company as well as engineers realise what they can do, I think that makes them realise they can do everything perfect given perfect squad(ideally they choose). Team decide everything hence they have full ownership for every piece & they awake 24Hrs to make sure everything will be up & running before the finish time.

Successful Hackathons showcase the true agile squad spirit

Hence plan Hackathons in your organisation to unleash the talent you have. Give chance to everyone to express.

Would love to hear comments from all friends & colleagues which can help us groom our knowledge on hackathons, how can we together make it better.