BBC Hack Week
Hackathons, innovation days, codefests — whatever you call them — have been a feature of the tech industry for the last 20 years, and one of the most powerful ideation tools at our disposal.
The premise is simple, given a theme or problem space, the hackathon participants must self-organise into teams to explore ideas, write some code, and deliver a working prototype or demo in a ridiculously short period of time.
In my time at the BBC I’ve taken part in many different flavours of hack — from large multi-department events, collaborations with other organisations, 24-hour hacks, week long hacks … no two are ever the same. It’s also been my privilege to organise many of these events — in particular our annual end-of-year hack week.
The tradition of the end-of-year hack predates my 9 years at the BBC. It’s origins are back in our pre-devops days, where our operations team managed our live systems for us, and the run up to Christmas was accompanied by a strict change freeze that brought all development to a crawl. Using this downtime for hacks and ideation was a great change of pace and a chance to connect with colleagues.
The days of strict change freezes are long gone, but the end-of-year hack has just grown and grown over the years, and has firmly established itself as a fixture of software engineering at the BBC. Our most recent hack was the biggest ever, a week-long event in the middle of December, bringing together all our development teams. Everyone was invited to participate; Omicron had just cast a new shadow of uncertainty, and forced us all back into Zoom again. A week focused on innovation and collaboration was very much the distraction we needed.
If you ever have the good fortune to organise an event of this size (we had 68 teams and nearly enough participants to smash the 500-person Zoom limit), there are some things we’ve learnt over the years to make these events the success…
Allow teams to self-organise
Resist the urge to over-manage the hack. Teams tend to pull together the people they need, and the good ideas float to the top. As an organiser your job is to make those teams and ideas visible, and join up teams where there are similar or complimentary ideas.
Identify your goals up front
Why are you running the hack? Is it for ideation? Is a development opportunity? Maybe its only purpose is to encourage collaboration — breaking down team boundaries and encouraging hacking across your organisation with people you wouldn’t normally work with is a fine goal in and of itself.
Target all disciplines
Hacks by their nature can seem a bit intimidating to the non-programmers amongst us, but that’s a real missed opportunity. A good hack idea can really be elevated by a multi-disciplinary approach, but also gives your contributors a safe and temporary opportunity to try other roles and exercise underutilised skills.
Get management buy-in
Whatever you do make sure you have the support of your senior management. You’ll need them to help publicise your event, but also to buy you the time away from the day-to-day of your regular work. You’ll also need to plan way in advance to make sure your contributors can step away from their regular responsibilities without it causing panic.
Work out how you’re going to showcase the ideas
With a small event, you can easily get all the teams to demo at the end of the event, but when you have 60+ teams this quickly becomes unfeasible. We opt for getting teams to produce a short (2 minute) video and compiling a showcase of all the hacks — or a selection of the best ones. If your event is massive you might want to consider a competition scenario to drive interest.
Remove the pressure to succeed
There can be too much pressure for teams to deliver a new and brilliant feature to your users. It needs to be absolutely fine for a team to say: “we tried it and it didn’t work”. Some of the best hacks I’ve seen focussed on clarrifying a technical direction, exploring some new design concepts, or shaving minutes off the build process. Even just an outcome of “we learned some stuff” should be applauded.
Whatever you’re planning, remember you’re trying to facilitate creativity — so you need to give everyone the freedom to think big, but the right constraints to focus that creativity (just google “constraint + innovation”) if you want to dwell on that some more. In the meantime, we’ve made a short video that captures some of the highlights of our most recent event, and some thoughts from our contributors…
