The 10 most important steps to a successful Nocode Hackathon

Setting up a Nocode hackathon within your organization can be a real game changer, regardless of your familiarity with Nocode technologies, your desire to learn more about this ecosystem, or your desire to find solutions that could help your organization.

What are the benefits of using Nocode?

Digital tools have undergone extraordinary developments in recent decades. Never before has IT had such an important role in the company and never before has the need for digital solutions been so great.

But all this has had a downside: the time to install, train or develop tools has increased as they have become more complex. It is not uncommon for specific development projects or ERP implementations to take several years.  
At a point in time when time-to-market, agility, productivity, quality, security, telecommuting, and collaboration between all teams, including field teams, are more essential than ever, such delays are no longer acceptable.  

Good no-code solutions allow to create complete secure, cloud, mobile and collaborative solutions, in a few hours, 100 to 1000 times faster than a traditional development, without any IT skills required.

Is it worthwhile to organize a Nocode hackathon for your company?

In spite of all its advantages, due to lack of time, fears about security and presumed difficulties of integration into the company's IT system, Nocode solutions are still too little implemented.
To help discover the benefits of Nocode, the organization of a hackathon can be a good way to start.

The term hackathon is a contraction of the English word hack (quick solution to a problem, whatever it is) and marathon (endurance test challenging the resistance of the participants). In business, a hackathon is a competition that invites participants to come up with the most relevant and innovative response to a business problem.

Initially dedicated to "real" developers, the hackathon is perfectly adapted to "citizen-developers" and is therefore an ideal way to discover Nocode.

The goal: to offer project managers, members of the IT department, the innovation department and/or the business teams themselves, to create in a few hours (from 24 to 72 hours) a first version of the digital tools essential to their success.

Online or physical, or even hybrid, it is applicable to all sectors of activity and all business lines, and allows to solve problems that sometimes have not been solved satisfactorily for years.

And the good news is that when well prepared, with the right tools, easy to use and with a good animation, it is also an excellent team building activity, with a real professional contribution.

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Discover how the Enedis - Champagne-Ardennes teams succeeded in creating their own Nocode applications in 2 days with the help of TimeTonic experts

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The 10 steps to a successful Nocode hackathon in your organization

1. Define your objective: enrich your innovation process, accelerate your digital transformation, solve business problems ;
2. Choose the right target communities within the employees: a combination of business and technical, ideally from several departments, is ideal. 20 to 30 participants, divided into 2 or 3 teams ;
3. Build the theme: select 2 or 3 unsolved business problems, proposed by the business teams themselves or by management. Some suggestions: data exploitation, mobile applications for field teams, process automation, collaborative platform, replacement of scattered complex tools or scattered spreadsheets imposing double or triple input, ...
4. Select the Nocode tools: ideally platforms that are easy to learn in a few hours and that can be really used in production afterwards, such as a hybrid database, automation tool and reporting tool, and train the participants at least beforehand ;
5. Define a precise schedule, rules and location: 2 days in a row for example, in the office or outside, with simple rules ;
6. Provide appropriate resources to support the participants: project managers trained in agile methods such as scrum are, for example, very good facilitators to help reduce the problem into several tasks and choose priorities to obtain an immediate first result.
7. Give an identity to the event, communicate before, during and after: communicate internally, obtain the sponsorship of the highest executives who will participate in the discovery of the results and will be members of the jury, record interviews with the participants, create a satisfaction survey.
8. Maintain interest throughout the event: have an ice breaker session in the morning, organize mixed team lunches, provide t-shirts and other goodies, prizes and a closing speech with cocktails.
9. Define evaluation criteria and sections for prizes: e.g. best field solution, best innovation, best team spirit, best presentation, etc. Ideally each team wins something, the goal being to reward hard work and good humor.
10. Afterwards: review, follow up on the projects initiated and convert them into a real work tool so as not to lose momentum, and communicate internally.

In conclusion, a Nocode hackathon allows to debunk the myths about Nocode and is an excellent way to solve business problems while organizing a pleasant team building activity.