As a means of spring-boarding innovative ideas to complex problems, the collaborative nature of a hackathon makes it a superb way of bringing creative minds together. But there’s more to it than simply gathering a group of people together and hashing out a half-baked plan.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to run a successful internal hackathon.
What is a hackathon?
A hackathon is a timed event in which teams made up of both technical and business experts get together to collaborate intensively on creative projects. The aim is to design, build and present the most innovative solution to a problem, and then pitch a final concept, prototype or presentation to the stakeholders.
Ever tagged a friend on Facebook or used Instagram’s Hyperlapse app to create a time-lapse video on your phone?
Both started out as hackathon concepts.
How do hackathons work?
Hackathons are timed events where teams aim to develop solutions to problems facing a particular business or group of people. The results are then pitched to stakeholders via a final presentation to decide on a winner.
Hackathons, although they are technical events, can be attended by anyone, allowing for cross-department collaboration that delivers creativity and communication to flourish. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for devs to perfect their ability to translate technical topics to non-technical members of the team.
Are hackathons worth it?
Hackathons are a great way for teams to explore skills that they might not get the opportunity to use in their usual work. They also offer the ability for separate teams to work collaboratively which can improve workplace communication in the long term.
For Hackathons to offer the benefits that they should, then adequate time needs to be set aside, as well as incentivising the hackathon for managers. Some devs online state that the best hackathons they’ve participated in are ones where they are given plenty of time to complete the tasks (over 48 hours), given a comprehensive brief and when they are paid for the time if it’s taking place in a workplace.
If these criteria are met, hackathons can provide a space for niggling problems to be solved in a fun, fulfilling way.
Things to consider for a hackathon
Before you embark on a Hackathon journey, there are a few criteria that you must think about. Here are the crucial aspects that should be considered before you start a Hackathon.
Who takes part in a hackathon?
In theory, anyone can take part in a Hackathon, but it should be centred around developers who will be able to write the code for the tool being developed.
However, it can be an incredibly inclusion event, with ideas and strengths coming from a range of different departments.
You might want to restrict entries to certain departments, specific roles or include different levels of seniority (for example, to encourage skill sharing between senior and entry-level employees).
What kind of projects are allowed in a hackathon?
The only rule for Hackathons, generally, is that you can’t work on existing projects. The idea of a Hackathon is to develop new ideas that solve existing problems. While finishing an existing project can solve the problem, that’s not the point of a Hackathon.
How long is a hackathon?
The ideation process of can last up to a couple of weeks for ideas to be thought about and shared amongst the team. The development process can last anywhere from 24 to 72 hours, with the goal to have a fully realised tool by the end of the hackathon, ready to be presented to stakeholders.
How to come up with hackathon ideas
Your goal could be to make an existing product better or to invent an entirely new solution. Decide on an end goal and use a clear set of rules to keep your event focused. You must be careful not to narrow the focus too much as this reduces the opportunities to innovate, but you must constrain it enough so that any prototypes or concepts produced are relevant to your company.
Decide on your deliverables
What must each team produce by the end of the hackathon, to qualify for completion? It could be a working prototype, a piece of code or a video proposal.
Step 1: Sell your idea
Getting everyone together in one place, setting them up with the tech they need, supplying food and drink and possibly even paying travel expenses – all while taking your team away from their regular projects – can be an expensive business. So, if this is your first hackathon, you’re going to have to do your homework if you want to sell the idea both to your stakeholders and potential participants.
Prepare for these common objections:
- Hackathons take away from existing prioritised work
- The company will be without essential infrastructure during the hackathon
- Hackathons are expensive
Highlight the potential benefits:
- Improve collaborative working
- Potential to improve a product or process in a very short space of time
- Give teams a new perspective on current projects
- Develop transferable skills
- Give other departments a glimpse of what software development entails
Namedrop the success stories. Companies who are renowned for innovation, like Google, Amazon, Netflix and Twitter, have all made hackathons a part of their corporate culture. Be sure to highlight their successes to sceptics; if it’s good enough for them then it’s surely good enough for you!
Step 2: Set the date
Organising your hackathon for a date that suits everyone is imperative. If you opt for a hackathon during crunch time, or at a time when you know your team is going to be under pressure elsewhere, you’re likely to receive a lot of pushback.
Look at project schedules as far in advance as you can and once you set the date, keep that time sacred. If you can, leave a bit of wiggle room around the week leading up to the event just in case projects do end up running over time.
Step 3: Choose your venue
You can definitely hold your hackathon on-site. If this is your plan, make your ‘regular’ space as alien as you can by:
- Rearranging the office
- Bringing in special equipment
- Supplying a good spread of food and drink – this will go a long way to boosting morale on the day and won’t blow the budget
Alternatively, hiring an external venue can be an easy way to create a buzz around your event and contribute to a novel atmosphere on the day. Booking out a local café or hiring a function room can be enough to help get your team’s heads out of the office and into the spirit of the hackathon.
Make sure there is enough physical space for everyone along with the equipment needed. Depending on your office culture, you might want to have a music system hooked up for the hackathon or quiet spaces for teams to retreat to when they want to focus in silence.
Regular appearances from the main stakeholders throughout the day also help the morale of the teams, and if they come bearing coffees or pizzas then what’s not to like?
Get creative with your surroundings – after all, your aim is to get the creative juices flowing!
Step 4: Judging and Prizes
Some sort of reward can be a good incentive for getting people involved, but what you’re offering is an important consideration to weigh up too. Do you want to offer a cash prize, a piece of tech or the support to move a project forward?
Cash prizes are a good draw but can cause overly competitive behaviour and sour the atmosphere at your event very quickly. Offering the resources a developer needs to further their project is a positive but effective motivator and may be more appropriate.
Think about giving away technical support, access to equipment or the chance to present the idea to senior stakeholders, as the winning prize.
Who will be the judge?
If you work in a large organisation, you can probably make up a judging panel of senior stakeholders. But, providing that confidentiality will allow for it, inviting a panel of industry experts can be a great way to drum up interest for your event and goes a long way to improving the turn out.
Next, you will need to set your criteria. It’s important that all projects are judged fairly, and against the same set of values. Otherwise, you run the risk of turning your hackathon into an internal popularity contest which is a sure-fire way to sap motivation from the room.
Some criteria that may be worth considering:
- Innovation:Is the solution especially creative? How outside-of-the-box would it be considered?
- Technical achievement:What technology was used in creating the solution?
- Application:How can it be used and what kind of impact will it make?
Step 5: Create a buzz
With the legwork carried out, now it’s time to get people excited about your event and there are plenty of ways to drum up the buzz around your upcoming hackathon:
- Announce the event on your company intranet
- Send out an email blast with the necessary details
- Create a collaborative document or channel where participants can start sharing ideas beforehand
- Create an online event page so participants can join
Start early but be careful not to bore people with the idea. There’s a fine line between broadcasting the idea and over-saturation; the last thing you want to do is sap that creative energy and make your hackathon feel tedious before it’s even begun!
Step 6: Start sharing ideas
Allow enough lead time before your event to generate those all-important ideas; at least two weeks is usually the ideal amount of time.
Use your objectives from Step 1 to put together a shared document (this could be a wiki page, a Slack channel, or a basic Excel spreadsheet) dedicated to Hackathon ideas.
Encourage everyone to share their ideas for suitable hackathon projects. Making this document accessible to everyone will help participants to start thinking creatively, bounce ideas off the rest of the group and get a feel for what they’d all like to work on.
By day one of your hackathon, your participants should be ready to pitch their potential projects.
During the course of the event, it’s a good idea the focus on the following qualities:
- Articulation:Projects should have a clear question or problem that they’re trying to solve, and the proposed solution needs a reasonable deree of specificity.
- Attainability:Completing a project takes time; manage each project’s goals in a way that participants are able to feel accomplished.
- Ease of onboarding:Projects should have tasks that even newcomers of all skill levels can make a start on.
- Stakeholder leading:A stakeholder can guide the project to real-world application – how can they be involved in the project
- Organisation:The designated leader needs to co—ordinate the project, giving team members something to work on and helping to welcome new team members.
Step 7: Mix up your teams
Traditionally, hackathons have had a technical focus because the objective is usually to solve a user problem, to develop a new application or to experiment with new tech.
But hackathons present a rare opportunity for inter-departmental collaboration and other disciplines including marketing and graphic design can be equally useful in project development, so think carefully about getting the balance right in each team.
Mixing different levels of experience works well, too. Encourage skill-sharing by teaming up less-experienced employees with senior developers. You could even invite applications from your local college or university and use your hackathon to recruit some of your industry’s up and coming talent later down the line.
Step 8: Keep it going
The worst thing you can do after a hackathon is… nothing. Hackathons aren’t there to exist in a vacuum, so it’s important that you follow up on things in a timely manner.
Don’t lose momentum on the projects that could have a positive impact on the organisation. Take stock of the following:
- Which ideas are ready for the development team?
- Can you take any to market?
- Which insights could be implemented elsewhere?
Watching their ideas go into production will be hugely rewarding for your team and will keep that positive vibe going after the event.
Step 9: The after-hack
Congratulations, you’ve successfully hosted your first hackathon! Now it’s time to review your event. Your team have probably learned a lot during the hackathon, about their colleagues, their skills and also about themselves. In conducting a review of the hackathon, consider some of the following when you reflect on things:
- Survey your team: find out what they liked and what they didn’t
- Carry out a retrospective cost-benefit analysis
- Publish your photos, videos and project success stories across your social channels
- Congratulate your participants and thank everyone involved
Hackathon must-haves
For a successful hackathon, there’s a few soft skills that are paramount. It’s not just skills such as coding and IT knowledge that can lead to a fruitful hackathon that delivers positive results. Here are a few skills that you’ll need to have, and hone, to successfully complete a hackathon.
Organisation
In order to run a successful hackathon, organisation is incredibly important. Not only must teams be organised properly so that teams are fair, but they must all have adequate equipment and space to pull off the exceptional results that we’re looking for. This leads on to our next soft skill.
Teamwork
A team can have the best equipment, the most experienced team members, but without teamwork to gel it all together, it’s unlikely that they’ll do well. A successful team must be able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of its members so that each cog in the machine is working at full capacity.
Mentorship
As well as team work throughout the group, more senior members can use a hackathon as a time to demonstrate their mentorship skills. Junior members of the team might be full of energy and enthusiasm, but this can be a negative if it’s not targeted in the right places. This is where the experience of a senior member of staff can help to focus younger members of the team.
Time management
The idea of a hackathon is to compress a long-term project, which means that targets must be compressed. What might usually go through several rounds of discussions and take several days might have to be compressed into a half-hour meeting. It will also force you to consider how crucial meetings or discussions are and whether it’s a decision that can be made individually.
Presentation skills
When all is said and done, you must be able to present your project to the judges and/or other teams. It might be worth designating a presenter early into the hackathon so that they can spend the event gathering info, writing their script and putting together a presentation that expertly describes the proposal you’ve developed.
Hackathon benefits
There are a huge number of benefits that can come from a hackathon. The shortened timescale can help to streamline processes for future projects. Combine this with improved teamwork and communication skills across departments and you should find that the quality of work doesn’t drop.
Having team members in a slightly different environment with different tasks may also help to shine a light on some people’s skills that aren’t visible during their day-to-day activities, making it an excellent way to scout for talent internally.
Of course, you can use insights to host an even better hackathon next time around. But you might also find that you’ve discovered new ways to work, to increase productivity or to harness your team’s hidden talents. The important thing is to put the lessons you’ve learnt into action the next time. Not everything will have gone off without a hitch, through repeated hackathons things only stand to improve with each successive one.
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