[Hackathon Mini Series] — Vodafone Secondment System: How we built a platform to connect our Engineers and Project Managers
Welcome to our second blog of our mini series on our Hack-to-the-future hackathon. This week we have Stacey talking about how her team created a secondment system in 2 days.
A couple of weeks ago, I participated in my first Vodafone hackathon, held across two days in our London office. The theme of this hackathon was “Create the Future”, one of our Vodafone Spirit values. The goal was to explore new ideas that will inspire us to move our business forward, looking at new emerging technologies, ground-breaking ideas, and options to enhance employee and customer experiences within Vodafone.
We had 14 teams assembled for this hackathon, made up of people with a variety of skill sets including Engineers, Designers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Product Owners. Each team had around 10 hours to complete their project, and we concluded with each team giving a short presentation to demonstrate their creation.
Our Idea
Our project for this hackathon was to build a Secondment System where employees can register that they are light on work for a period of time. The system would enable managers to connect with engineers who would like to offer their time, and invite them to take up an opportunity on a different project based on matched skills and availability.
The idea is to benefit all parties - the engineers get to increase their visibility and knowledge across the business, managers are able to add capacity to their team to deliver value to customers, and Vodafone benefit from increase engagement, autonomy and utilisation of our people!
Preparation
This was not a simple project, so we wanted to do as much preparation ahead of time as possible to allow us to get straight into coding once the hackathon started.
Our team was made up of people across different areas of Vodafone, and most of us had never met each other before. We started with an initial kick off call to introduce ourselves, delegate roles and responsibilities to each team member and agree on our tech stack.
Leveraging our internal design system, we put together some mockups in Figma of each page we would need in our application. We also considered how we would architect this on the backend, and documented the database structures and API endpoints we would need.
Once we had a clear picture of all our technical requirements, we created user stories for each task on a sprint board. During the hackathon, each team member could assign themselves a task from the board so we would be able to see quickly which features had already been built, what we needed to prioritise to demonstrate a full journey, and what we still had left to do.
Hack to the Future — Day 1
Fuelled with coffee and pastries, we hit the ground running on our project. Our team was made up of six people — three working on the front-end build, two on the back-end, and one preparing the presentation we would need to give at the end of the event.
Our back-end was architected around two database tables — users and projects — which meant the workload split between each engineer was pretty even.
The division of work on the front-end was a little more tricky as we had more than three pages to build, but we grouped the views into three main areas:
- User details: Registration / Login / Profile
- Single Request: Create / View / Edit
- Request listing
We agreed on a JSON data structure at the beginning, so the front-end engineers could work using mock data whilst the back-end was built. Our plan was to integrate the front-end and back-end together towards the end of Day 1, or first thing on Day 2.
However, as we were nearing the end of the day we realised we still had a lot left to do on both the front-end and back-end and we weren’t confident we would be able to successfully complete the integration in time. We only had around 3 hours of hacking time on Day 2 before the presentations, so we decided to focus on polishing the front-end and rely on mock data for our demonstration.
Hack to the Future — Day 2
The morning was a little frantic as we made the final tweaks to our presentation slides and put the finishing touches on our application — building the last bits of the UI, fixing bugs, and cleaning up our mock data.
By lunch time, our application was looking pretty good. Whilst we hadn’t finished all the features we had set out to build, we had enough to give a decent demonstration of our project and knew what we could do to extend the project in the future.
The presentations started at 1:30pm, with each team getting a 7 minute time slot to sell their idea, explain the problem they were trying to solve and show off what they’d built. Our presentation and demo went smoothly, although the 7 minutes goes by super quick and we ran out of time just as we got to our last slide.
All of the presentations were at a high standard and it was great to see what the other teams had achieved over the last two days. Our project came third in the audience vote so we were happy with that result.
What would we do differently?
In hindsight, we tried to do too much within the short time we had. The planning and preparation we did ahead of the hackathon saved us valuable time, but we were too ambitious with the number of features we tried to build into the app.
If we had approached this as creating a minimum viable product we would have been better off, and that would have freed up some time to focus on the core features. For example, the edit functionality could have been omitted altogether from our UI as we ran out of time to build it properly and we didn’t have enough time to demo it during the presentation. This is a feature that could have been included in future iterations of the app.
Future plans
We had a lot of ideas for how we could build upon our application to integrate further with existing systems within Vodafone, including:
- Email/Slack/Teams notifications when you are matched with a new work request, or when a work request is updated
- Single sign on — allow employees to login with their existing Vodafone credentials without needing to create a new account
- Link secondment requests with user stories in Azure DevOps
- Integration with our skills and learning platform, Grow with Vodafone. An employee’s skills could be taken from their existing skills profile, removing the need for them to specify their skills again within the secondment system
Final thoughts
Aside from being a purely technical exercise, this was a great opportunity to work on something without the usual restraints of production code, enabling us to move fast and break things and get the satisfaction of a quick feedback loop from initial scoping, to seeing something working!
It was an opportunity to learn how we each worked well together with a new team, and tried other project roles for size; UX design, project management and our presentation design skills, alongside our usual engineering roles, all in a safe and fun environment, but working on something with real business value!
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