How the right Hackathon formula can do wonders for your teams
By: Tom Holt
Tags: Remote Working, Employee Engagement, Trust, Hackathons, Hackathon Organizing

Photo by Myriam on Pixabay

Why should I take part in a Hackathon? But I’ve a mountain of project work! I have to talk to people I don’t know? But but but…

If you’re asking yourself the same questions when Hackathon time comes around, I want to try and convince one or two of you to think again. Let me make an admission: I used to be the same. But I’ve come around to thinking:

Hackathons are a great trust building tool (in the absence of many others) Hackathons are a learning opportunity (not just for the teams involved) Hackathons improve efficiency (“get stuff done quickly”) Hackathons promote healthy team dynamics.

I’m writing this because we’ve just had our second successive year hosting an internal Hackathon at HMH and third overall. By no means an expert, I was somehow lucky enough to work with the winners of our inaugural one back in 2015. Last year I joined the organisers and we got huge interest in what was a successful pre-Covid one.

1. Build trust

There are lots of great resources on why trust is important in an organisation.

An old one but a good one: Patrick Lencioni’s Trust Pyramid

Patrick Lencioni talks about five dysfunctions of a team (2002) and a trust pyramid (trust being the bottom layer).

Neuroscience studies look at how trust can bring the best out in teams, and there are products that attempt to measure it.

At HMH trust is the foundation of our business. We think hackathons are one very tangible way to help build trust. It’s imperative we are cognizant of that in our approach for this not to be seen as a top-down initiative.

Trust is earned when actions meet words ~ Chris Butler

For the HMH hackathons we try to encourage participation without enforcing it. By allowing teams and individuals to self-organise, to work under their own steam without their usual day-to-day project pressures, the company is sending a message that “we trust you”. Teams get freedom to embrace failure, challenge themselves and hopefully have a bit of fun and exposure along the way. In return, we get some really interesting results that might trigger new work, colleagues are inspired and some trust has been built.

2. A learning opportunity

Our 2019 pre-Covid hackathon was so well attended that we the organisers learned some hard lessons, fast. We had too many entrants which diluted their impact and made judging tiresome for judges and participants alike! This year we looked back at our retrospective notes and acted on them. We simplified the judging, scoring process and made it more transparent. We made the categories more explicit. We did not reject any entries but we had a much more manageable number. Learning how to make these events be their most productive and engaging in changing times is an ongoing process.

For the participants, Hackathons provide great opportunities to work on key ideas that for one reason or another are not on any official roadmap. It’s a chance to put skills into practice, to share ideas amongst peers and demonstrate credence to a wider audience.

3. Improve efficiency

Here in a hackathon environment, individuals engage in a team with one shared goal, with only bare-bones ceremony in how they do their work. The daily norms are abandoned in favour of maximising productivity. When do you as a developer get the opportunity to do this normally?

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently ~ Henry Ford

As a team member, to have freedom to abandon sprint ceremonies for two days to do “real work” allows developers to work more efficiently. A chance to be truly lean. Teams must judge themselves where to invest time. Embrace failure and re-direct. There is no room for perfectionism!

4. Promote healthy team dynamics

Teams who are working under significant time pressure (they have one working day to develop their ideas) must decide who takes the lead on some tasks, sharing knowledge and make decisions on the fly.

Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We ~ Phil Jackson

They have to step out of their comfort zone. The best ones tend to collaborate the most effectively between the different personalities on the team.

Picture by Geralt on Pixabay

So what did we observe this year…?

Selling the idea was a challenge

Meeting fatigue was a major obstacle this year. Recent surveys had verified this: only 60% of staff voted for another Hackathon event. 40% of all people surveyed in our Dublin office claimed meeting fatigue. Attendance of online social events was 50% lower than earlier in the year. Oh no, was this year’s event going to be a damp squib….?

We listened to popular opinion and mixed up the format, introducing some separate speaker events in parallel to the Hackathon. This time we threw innovation in to the mix, as we encouraged teams to focus not only on solving real world teacher/student problems or to automate an existing manual process but to also look at new technologies. And 2020 being 2020, it was all 100% remote which introduced it’s own challenges and some surprising benefits…

The Hackathon day was highly competitive

13 submissions made it through to the Hackathon Day. Project submissions were indeed down from 2019 but it didn’t stop us. The field was very close and the quality high. But it wouldn’t be a hackathon without some friendly competition and this year was no exception.

We had allowed one afternoon for presentations and judging. Judges were really impressed with the quality and breadth of the presentations; it was going to be difficult to choose the winners.

By the way, even if you didn’t win a category, you technically won by just taking part. This is not merely hyperbole. For all the reasons above, it’s really not about winning a trophy (in my book anyway).

Hackathon category winners

Our Hackathon winner wowed our judging panel and audience alike with his slick video presentation of a chat bot to support customers of our HMH Ed platform. Why haven’t we done this before? Congrats to Aaron Mulvaney from our Support Operations team. He narrowly beat our Magic Lantern team, who didn’t miss out as they received the public vote for their impressive live demo of a teacher-student collaboration tool that uses WebRTC open framework. Aaron’s was a pre-recorded demo; a flexible format proved fruitful for both teams here.

Magic Lantern: Hackathon People’s Choice winners

Innovation category winners

Overall Innovation winner was Dennis Kenny with an automated refactoring solution using Codemods. The clear winner of a tight category. Special mention of second place taken by Attila Vágó’s Micro-Front-End App Generation. Side note: Dennis’ choice of backing track to his technical presentation generated a few well-intended giggles amongst the audience as he allegedly hypnotised the judges to score highly :)

Pipping the other entries for People’s Choice award was Kris Iyer with Open Badges: a standard in EdTech to recognize accomplishments by issuing digital tokens and badges for students and educators.

Eric Totten, participating from Chicago in the Innovation category

So what did we learn?

It’s not rocket science to host a hackathon (but a bit of neuroscience might help). We have found again that some simple principles go a long way: