Hack Day 2023—Another 24 hours at the innovation station

A wave of fresh creativity, collaboration between people who have never met, and some good old-fashioned fun—it’s Hack Day at The Adaptavist Group again.

A waterfall of creativity, interdepartmental collaboration with people you’ve never met before, and some good old-fashioned fun—it’s time to dive into another exciting Hack Day at The Adaptavist Group! Each year, we give everyone in The Group who wants to participate a whirlwind 24 hours to unleash their ingenuity and present a creative project. It’s not just about a project though; this extension of our company culture fosters innovation and encourages our team to break free from their usual jobs. Hack Day organiser Jon Mort says: “Hack Day is an opportunity to take 24 hours to build something, to innovate on something, collaborate, scratch an itch, work on something outside of your day-to-day role, produce a presentation about it, and then show it off across The Group.”

Unlike traditional hack days and hackathons, our event is open to anyone—not just coding and development wizards. This means people in marketing, finance, design, HR, and any other department can assemble teams and forge shiny new ideas or nifty improvements to existing products. With such a large and diverse workforce, every year people can enter Hack Day, team up with so many people they’ve never spoken with, and make some new work friends.

Hack Days aren’t just for The Adaptavist Group either. Over the years, we’ve witnessed many projects that iterate on one of our partners’ products and inspire us to look beyond The Group. We even encourage our hackers to submit their labours to Atlassian’s Codegeist and monday.com’s AI hackathon events. Some of these continue to evolve post-Hack Day and become genuine products that make impressive impacts.

This year, there were 14 hard-working teams with 73 inspired team members. We had so many brilliant ideas covering various subjects, including three projects concerning the en-vogue darling of the tech world and a focus area of The Adaptavist Group, AI. These are the five awards that the teams hacked for:

Overall Winner—the best project involving team members from other business units, presentation effort, and solution or insight for future work.
Best in Partnership—the best project that involves at least one of our partners.
Best in Practice—the best project relating to at least one of our five practices: agile, DevOps, ITSM, cloud, and work management.
Best Presentation—the presentation with the best content and videography.
Spirit of Hack Day—the project with the overall best collaboration, insight, and effort, and embodied what Hack Day is all about.

The JOIN team achieved the Overall Winner prize for their helpful interactive map that permits users to query how The Adaptavist Group is structured: by business units, teams, products, people, and more.

Hack Day’s roaring success is emphasised by its year-on-year growth. Engineer Team Lead Jon Bevan is a veteran of the event and was particularly encouraged this year: “Like with previous Hack Days, it was fun to work with people that I don’t usually get to on a day-to-day basis and build relationships with more colleagues. I was more excited this year than in previous years as I had an idea with a clear, achievable goal that would actually help my team and maybe others. This proved to me that for narrowly scoped apps, you can build something functional within a really short space of time and get some real value out of it. It’s worth making space for these kinds of projects throughout the year.” His team cooly walked away with the Best in Practice prize.

The newbies also discovered new challenges and ways of working. Senior Brand Marketing Manager Sarah McCoy won the Spirit of Hack Day award in her debut Hack Day and reported: “For my first Hack Day, I had an idea for an innovative brand and marketing project that needed more resources and technical support than I could meet. Bringing in 11 people globally from across half of our brands was invaluable. This was the first time I'd led a multidisciplinary squad, and working on something conceptual with no clear end product in mind was challenging. But the actual value of the day was exploration and discovery. I plan to further develop our project into something real for customers.”

With this Hack Day behind us, we’re already brimming with excitement about what next year will cook up. We hope 2024’s event provides a platform for an even greater number of inspired participants to connect with new faces, soak up unique expertise and experiences, create remarkable solutions that they can further develop afterwards, and—most importantly—have a blast.