zH4ck: How a Hackathon Spurred Mainframe Innovation
This post summarizes our experience running an internal Zowe hackathon throughout Broadcom’s Mainframe Division. Zowe is a disruptive technology in the mainframe world. We wanted to best understand how we could leverage it to do our jobs even better, so we ran an experiment. Results and best practices are as follows.
“Hackathon.”
When I hear the word hackathon, I’m brought back to my final semester of college; a time of rampant creativity, innovation, and “how in the world are we going to deliver this by 11:00am tomorrow?”
Ultimately, that spirit is exactly what a hackathon aims to capture: a relatively short period in which teams are set free with only an innovative spirit, a handful of goals, a ticking timer, and enough pizza to make it all happen.
Why a hackathon?
We knew from the start that we had one goal in mind: to gain a better understanding of Zowe throughout our organization.
Remember this: Developers are smart people. They always know when you try to slip one past them.
To successfully implement a change in an organization, you need two things:
- Support from the top. Not just a “yeah, do it, and I’ll check back next year”. Real money-where-your-mouth-is support and evangelizing of the idea, encouragement of participation, carving out of time, and — best case — a reward meaningful for those participants who go the furthest.
- Buy-in from everyone. Not just your direct reports. Not just the executives. Everyone single person from the newest hire to the most senior manager should understand the ‘why’ behind a change, and be bought into the direction.
We had (1) from the very start. We had the support to have time carved from busy schedules and product managers that wanted a thousand things done yesterday. We had ideas for rewards. We had the local pizza place on speed-dial.
How, then, do you gain the buy-in of hundreds of developers that Zowe is a good idea?
You set them free for a few days, and ask them to use Zowe to solve their own problems.
Have you ever seen ‘surprise ingredient basket’ kitchen competitions? Our secret ingredient was Zowe. Same idea.
How did it work?
We set the expectation early: participation was optional, but those who did participate would receive two days carte-blanche to work on anything they felt would have some value to their team or the business.
- Got a cool new product idea?
- Want to streamline your automation?
- Have a clever enhancement on how you can link your product to Zowe?
- Can Zowe help your build pipeline? (yes, it can)
- Want to enable ‘fun’ mode?
Any idea that anyone — developer, UX engineer, tech writer, scrum master, any role — could justify had some benefit somewhere was accepted. Fun mode was just a bonus on top of an already jammin’ idea.
They also got a free t-shirt.
But wait, there’s more!
Teams were grouped regionally, and competed against each other come the close of the two-day hackathon. The top three teams in each region received a few fun prizes: a team lunch, a trip to an escape room; prizes that aren’t too monetarily valuable, but are a chance to get out, do something fun with your colleagues, and be proud of what you created.
The top three winners of the regional sites were brought into a global judging session in the following week. The judges were only given a brief blog written by each team about their idea, the value, their learnings, and the outcome for that team. They weren’t given the team’s location, or who was on it. They were only allowed to judge on the merit of the idea itself.
The grand prize for the Hackathon — the reward for the team who took first globally — was a trip to SHARE 2020, and a chance to talk about their idea in front of the largest Mainframe conference of the year.
So, did it work?
Absolutely!
39 teams.
Over 200 people participating across a multitude of cross-functional roles and global sites.
A YouTube video.
From bringing a customer on-site to jointly solve real world pain points, to building a Web Console for Zowe CLI, to creating a Web GUI to help a system programmer track status and manage the up/down of programs and regions they care about; these are just three of nearly forty amazing ideas that came out of just two days of work.
The real value of a hackathon isn’t just in what finished code comes out the other side. The real value is in generating what could be done; in generating proof-of-concepts that you wouldn’t have uncovered without letting developers be developers.
It’s in the team-cohesion and collaboration that fosters the free spirit of innovation.
Five Tips for a Successful Hackathon
- Have support from the top of the organization! You must have commitment from your leaders to give your people the time to innovate.
- Know what you want to get out of your hackathon: Product ideas? Knowledge spread on a topic? (Zowe!) Networking among employees?
- Provide the tools for success early. Ensure that infrastructure is ready to support the hackathon, and that participants are trained in any technology necessary to take part.
- Let the developers be free! Don’t over-structure their hackathon. Give them the time, and let them innovate.
- Make it fun! Gamify the event. Provide snacks and incentives.
If you would like help deploying Zowe in your organization, or in running a Zowe hackathon, please reach out to me at kyle.woodworth@broadcom.com. I’m happy to lend you a hand.
For more content on Zowe, visit the Zowe blogsite on Medium.
You might also be interested in checking out how to get Node.js running on your mainframe, or how Zowe is entering the mobile world!
