Exploring The Company’s Skills By Running Technical Hackathons

Let’s face it, there is hardly any time left, after a hectic day at work, to explore or unlock the creativity of the employees, unless an exciting event like Hackathon is organized. Even though, they have a lot of creative ideas, due to lack of time, they are never able to pursue the ones that are worth doing.

In order to let their innovation to shoot for the stars and imagination run free, companies need to create a such opportunities for the employees to brainstorm some creative new ideas.

This is the reason why we set aside some extra time for activities that, pushes the infusion of technology and foresightedness, at regular intervals. We build a space for them to put across their crazy and effective ideas.

“Why Hackathon is a must for any company?”  

It shifts the concentration of the employees, and get them out of their comfort zone. This challenging competition allows them to increase the speed of their decision making capacity. Below mentioned are the most important conclusion that can be drawn from a successful Hackathon;

• Paves the way for new leaders to emerge
• Bombards employees with multiple chances to experiment
• Initiates mind-blowing innovations
• May result into the development of new apps or products, based on trending technologies
• Create cross-team collaborations

There is a chance that every Hackathon might not result into development of an application or any effective idea. But it is possible to fetch learning lessons from the complete experience.

Below mentioned are a few tips to run a successful Hackathon at your workplace;

Get Support From The Executive and Management Leadership

It is necessary for everyone to set their work aside for some time. This surely effects the short-term ability of the company to function towards its quarterly or annual goals, but it is important to look at the broader perspective. The leaders dedicatedly need to support Hackathon and its aim, so that the team is not getting mixed signals about the trade-offs that are being involved.

Leaders need to focus on two major aspects of the competition. Have a look…

• What is the goal for a particular Hackathon?
• What are the expectations from the participants?

It is a perfect time to stress on the opportunity to take risks, pop crazy ideas, creativity and experiments. Leaders need to seize this opportunity to empower the team to take strong decisions, handle problems in various ways, and if not then fail spectacularly.

Are you thinking, why am I laying my focus on failures?

See, some failures are able to teach you more about yourself, than a few successful efforts could. It lets you evaluate your own process, tooling and infrastructure. This allows the entire organization to turn more productive.

In other words, even if the teams are not able to create an app, they gain a valueable experience that is going to benefit them, for the rest of their lives. Even if it is a gamble, it is a good one to take.

Increase The Involvement Of Right People

You know what is the magic of Hackathon? It encourages the people from different departments to mix and prove their working efficiency. So that everyone can have a less sporadic experience. It is necessary to gather experts in a variety of relevant subject areas, like cloud storage, ML, app development, etc, to act as advisers and problem solvers. So that the teams don’t waste time trying to learn new technologies from the start.

Organize

If you think, running and organizing a Hackathon is easy, then you have figured it out all wrong. It requires its own huge chunk of work. Two separate spaces for team formation and presentations need to be set aside. It is important to publicize it and accelerate the fun factor and excitement. Then in the end, serious  evaluation must be done, in order to announce the results.

The real and best evaluation happens face to face. Therefore, by gathering everyone in a free-flowing conversation, accurate results can be drawn.

Preparation

Preparing prior to the Hackathon helps everyone to hit the ground running, when the week starts. Start by asking questions related to the competition.

Successful and healthy competition can only be assured by pushing everyone to think outside the box.

Conclusion

Hackathon is a creative way to solve existing atrocities in a novel way, and to praise the creativity of each and every employee. It allows them to discover the ideas together, work together, and most importantly learn together. This is the reason why TECHUGO, a leading top mobile app development company is organizing this year’s first Hackathon; #techhackathon, on Saturday, 13^th July, 2019. Stay tuned to this space, in order to witness the ULTIMATE BATTLE OF TECHIES.