Create High Performing Teams - Learn Agile & Hackathons

FNB is one of the largest banks in South Africa and has a reputation of being highly innovative and entrepreneurial. We generally like to do new things and we let our various divisions work out how best to run their individual business units. We’ve also had a long running programme of rewarding employees to be innovative and do things differently. So its no surprise that FNB was also the first bank in South Africa to launch its own hackathon in 2015. a few colleagues and I just wanted to get a couple of project teams together and see if we could accelerate their output by working continuously over a period of a couple of days without any distractions or corporate processes getting in the way.

1st Case Study: Dr Jeff Chen from GIBS business school in South Africa wrote a case study and teaching aid about how codefest drives corporate innovation.

2nd Case Study: The South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technology has an annual conference at which papers are presented. The paper "Agile and Hackathons: A case study of emergent practices at the FNB Codefest" was presented in 2017.  In this case study you will also read about the technical judging component that was added to Codefest one year and how this drove technical excellence (in addition to the primary benefits of collaboration and motivation).

QuantFest is a competition for predictive modelling and analytics.

Employees of the FirstRand group compete to produce the best models and analytical solutions to solve the proposed business challenges. Various internal and external datasets are made available in a secure platform, which participants must use to create their solutions. The competition aimed to connect the data science community across the divisions in FirstRand and foster the sharing of knowledge, inspiration and ideas.

Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>

One of the four values of the Agile Manifesto is “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” This is an important value of agile and you will need to get this right if you want to achieve the benefits of agile. We found this collaboration happened naturally at codefest and you will observe it at your hackathon as well – improved collaboration is just the most efficient way of achieving higher performance. When you create an artificial deadline and you get people working together with a common objective then they won’t worry about documents and contracts and fine print, they will be more concerned with getting the job done. Unfortunately a lot of corporate policies cause a lot of effort to protect people and things and agreements, while actually that same effort should go into breaking down the barriers that require those contracts and agreements in the first place.

Watch the video of the highlights from FNB Codefest in 2015 to hear from leaders and teams about moonshots, prototyping and the biggest corporate hackathon in South Africa.

Observe and learn from leaders and teams talking about:

• How collaboration happens across divisions within FirstRand to "go after moonshots"

• The new ways of working and how that accelerates innovation to "make magic happen"

• Team members like working with other experts that they don't know in a "cool environment" and "cool concept"

• Solutions that make a difference for our customers which accelerates innovation from months to hours

• Blockchain prototyping for the treasury environment

• Developers who love to do this in their spare time that "reminds us why we do what we do"

• The importance of self-disruption to respond to how the industry is changing

• How the event offers insights about ways of working that should be "at the core of our business"

• The way teams work at the event using Agile principles

• An intense team environment that creates a single focus on getting the job done

• "When we go back to the office we should do it like this ... which is a lot more Agile ... this is the competitor advantage"

• The dragons den, judging process and awards for prototypes

In this lesson we will look at how the FNB codefest improved individual motivation and how you can run a hackathon to improve the motivation of your employees. The Agile manifesto says that if you want to be Agile you should “build projects around motivated individuals” – see how the environment still depends on motivated individuals. We ‘ve learnt how you can increase team collaboration but teams still consist of individuals and they need to be motivated to ensure that the overall team is successful.

Watch the video of the highlights from FNB Codefest in 2017 to hear from leaders and teams about moonshots, prototyping and the biggest corporate hackathon in South Africa.

Observe and learn from business leaders and teams:

• Focus on ideation before the event

• Personal mastery and skills to drive innovation

• Enjoyable, motivating environment for teams

• How team members feel about being part of incentivised motivation

• The focus on prototypes after the event

• Improvements on previous events

• How the event is part of an innovation value chain or sprint

Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>

In addition to accelerating Agile practices, a hackathon is like a moonshot factory. You put some highly ambitious people together to try and solve some massive problems and sometimes they actually do. Its been proven by many tech firms and other industries have been doing more and more hackathons as well. Such contests are also triggered by crises as well. The Covid 19 pandemic of 2020 triggered a number of global, online hackathons such as hashtag build for covid 19 global online hackathon which challenged developers to build software solutions with social impact.

Watch the video of the highlights from FNB Codefest in 2019 to hear from leaders and teams about moonshots, prototyping and the biggest corporate hackathon in South Africa.

Observe and learn from the following

• Competitive / team collaboration environment

• Motivated individuals and experts getting together with a single focus to solve business problems

• Incentivised innovation contests

• Alignment of prototypes to sponsored business strategy

• Teams that are enjoying the freedom and focus of the environment away from the office

• Excitement and motivation to solve problems

• Support from top leaders in FNB, Wesbank, RMB and FirstRand

• Focus on new technologies and new ways of working

Downloadable:

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Throughout this course we will celebrate your progress at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. I really want you to succeed but you need to take action and keep going so look forward to these milestones of progress. I will see you there and cheer you on as you keep going from one milestone to the next >>