Learn How Agile & Hackathons Create High Performing Teams

Learn How Agile & Hackathons Create High Performing Teams, Get your teams collaborating and motivated; Agile lessons and business moonshots from the Harvard featured FNB Codefest.

“I liked the session as it focused on how I can improve my organisation’s team work environment by creating a creative space that allows for team collaborations” – Lihle

“A practical guide on how to implement Agile practices in a hackathon of a large enterprise and achieve successful business outcomes.” – Vinesh

“Peter is a really an innovative leader with great ideas and a canny ability to execute on them. His personal experience in standing up the CodeFest Hackathons in a corporate organisation and then working with others to make it a de-facto way of work in the organization, challenging the status-quo and driving innovative new ways of thinking and working, has contributed greatly to the success of the FRG Group. Now Peter shares that knowledge with us all and allows us to take the learnings from many years of tweaking this initiative, and bring it to your own organization. I would highly recommend this course to anybody stuck in their corporate way of work, looking for ways to break out of that pattern to start experimenting with hackathons and new agile ways of working.” – Jaen

This course will teach you how to drive Agile adoption through improved team collaboration and individual motivation. These practices emerged at the FNB codefest, the largest banking hackathon in South Africa and which was featured as a case study in the Harvard Business Review. I teach you exactly what we learned about Agile from the FNB Codefest and how you can benefit from this experience to achieve Agile in your own organisation. Hackathons are innovation contests that accelerate solutions but you will need to adapt them to your organsational culture. Learn how to do this and other important concepts in this course:

• Speed up your Agile journey by running a hackathon and learn from the FNB Codefest as an example of a successful hackathon
• The FNB Codefest became a large corporate hackathon with over 350 attendees and 40 teams competing in a 48 hour coding marathon
• Team naturally collaborated better because the environment supported it much better than at the office
• People at hackathons don’t worry about titles, departments or processes, they do whatever it took to get the job done
• Hackathons work just as well in a virtual format, like the 67 global events that happened during 2020 to develop solutions for COVID
• Well known solutions have come from hackathons; the Facebook Like button or Google’s maps search feature
• Google has a dedicated “moonshot factory” which is what a hackathon aim to achieve
• Individual motivation increases at hackathons because people feel they have autonomy and mastery
• These are intrinsic motivators that Daniel Pink describes in his book on the new methods of motivation
• The Agile Manifesto requires that a team environment must be trusting, supportive and allow motivated people to get on with their jobs
• A hackathon has many of these characteristics, and although it is a once off event, it offers a chance for learning and adaptation
• The FNB Codefest was successful because we integrated the event into our innovative culture and the coding marathon was part of a 6 day sprint
• A collaborative environment also meant that organisational siloes were broken down and people from departments sat next to eachother
• Agile requires a focus on collaboration, not on negotiation and the hackathon environment fosters this focus on collaboration
• Business and IT leaders observed these Agile practices in interviews and the case study was also presented at an international conference
• People at hackathons tend to feel they have more autonomy; they have chosen to be there and are free to work however they want to and as quickly as they need to in order to get the job done as part of the competition
• At FNB Codefest, masterclasses were included so that people were motivated by the intrinsic sense of having mastery of the technology
• SpaceX and NASA use the same principles to ensure they don’t limit the bright people in their organisation

The lessons in this course will help you transform your approach to adopting Agile by teaching you to run a hackathon that encourages Agile practices to emerge in how teams collaborate and individuals achieve new levels of motivation. This course will be a catalyst for your Agile journey and ensure that you drive it forward by learning from what has worked and adapting it to your situation and organisational requirements.