Overview

Hello, we're Mori, Maya S, and Flo from the Operations Enhancement Team at the Global Development Group. The Global Development Group organized an in-house Hackathon-style event called the "KINTO Global Innovation Days" which took place over six days from December 14th to 21st. During the first four days from December 14th to 19th, three seminars were held, followed by two days dedicated to actual development. This was the first time that such an event was held within KINTO Technologies. This article is the first in a series of articles on the event, sharing the journey leading up to it.

How it started

KINTO Technologies currently consists of about 300 members and has roughly doubled in size in about two years. Among them, the Global Development Group is also currently a large group of 60 members. As an organization, we are subdivided into teams of 5 to 10 members, each performing their tasks but communication across teams has always been a challenge. Even within the Global Development Group, it's common for people to struggle with matching faces to names. In addition, although we had planned and organized internal study sessions to improve communication and skills, they inevitably turned out to be a one-way knowledge sharing.

We were looking for an opportunity for engineers to learn through hands-on activities. In July, several of our group members participated in a Hackathon at Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), which made us think that hosting such an event within our group could address the above issues. So, we decided to start planning and proposing this event at the end of August.

Objectives and Timing

While hackathon events have a variety of benefits in general, our primary objective this time was to stimulate cross-team communication. We believe that by not leaning too much on the business side, a certain degree of freedom in thinking was gained.

We also set a goal of holding the event by the end of 2022 at the latest. The reason was that a major project involving the entire group was set to be completed by November, making it difficult to anticipate tasks beyond the fourth quarter.

Research and Content Review

Since this was our first time organizing an event, we first researched hackathon cases around the world to consider what an actual event should be like. Maya S was in charge of this research.

As various role models were studied, mainly from other companies' tech blogs and hackathon event sites, a pattern began to become apparent. By picking up the elements of the pattern and combining them with aspects that fit our organization and goals, we were able to put together the contents for our Innovation Days. Many examples of findings could be presented, but I will explain three of them below.

Finding 1: Benefits

As we prepared for the event, we felt the need to communicate the benefits of participating to the participants, stakeholders, and everyone involved. For example, the benefits to the organization include opportunities for gaining ideas for intellectual property, increasing member engagement, and discovering new strengths. As for the benefits to individuals, we emphasized that they can learn in various aspects by coming up with ideas that cannot be tackled in their daily work and by interacting with work processes and members they would not usually encounter.

Findings 2: Content ideas

Based on the above benefits, the seminars were incorporated as content. We learned that hackathons typically include talks by guest speakers, lectures, and workshops aligned with the event's theme and goals. For Innovation Days, we prepared a workshop on upstream processes which is not usually experienced, a communication workshop, and a workshop on the Toyota Way, given that it was a "Hackathon held by KINTO Technologies."

Many people would think of novelty items when it comes to events hosted by IT companies. This time, we distributed stickers, hoodies and clear files to the participants and support members. We also borrowed ideas from various events, like setting up criteria and rules for judging final pitches and deliverables, allocating time for coding, icebreakers, and prizes.

Note: After the event name was decided, the UIUX team in the Global Group designed the logo. Thanks to them, we ended up with fantastic novelty items. Appreciate it a lot!!!!

Findings 3: Theme setting

The last point we want to address is theme setting. Noting that many hackathons have narrowly focused themes and objectives set by organizers, and some even have sponsors for various themes, in our event, the managers decided a "Challenge Theme" and took on the role of "Challenge Owner" to sponsor and explain each theme to the participants. This approach allowed the manager to provide support and encouragement to the participants.

Reference:

• Council Post: Four Tips For Running A Successful Hackathon
• Urban Mobility Hackathon
• Find & Organize Hackathons Worldwide - Mobile, Web & IoT
• Hackathon Guide

Theme Review

For the content of the themes, four managers (the Group Manager and three Assistant Managers) who will actually evaluate on the day of the event selected four themes.

Theme 1-2	Theme 3-4

Encouraging members

Since this was the first attempt within the company, it took about three months from the time from the start of planning to recruiting members, through research, content review, and theme selection. At the beginning of November, after finalizing the theme, we held a project briefing for all Global Development Group members, and began recruiting on November 8th. The official event name, "KINTO Global Innovation Days," was decided.

There was a proposal to make participation mandatory for all participants, but we chose to respect autonomy and allowed volunteers to opt-in instead. Slack was used for recruiting. 🔻🔻

At the briefing, we received words of encouragement from our managers and told our participants that we had the support from our CEO and CIO. However, recruiting participants was initially challenging,

so we focused on highlighting the benefits directly to the team members Flo was responsible for this. We decided to communicate the benefits when talking in person in the office and through DMs. This allows us to ask members who are unable to participate why and make improvements.

First, we explained the experience and skills they would gain by participating in the event. We emphasized the opportunities to try programming languages they don't normally use, propose new tools, and suggest improvements that haven't been prioritized.

We also appealed to a sense of ownership and investment, as proposals made during the event could be used to improve processes in Global Group (Theme 3), be commercialized as a new service (Theme 1, 2), or be considered for participation in other hackathon events.

Among all, our top priority was creating a supportive environment. Although ideas are evaluated and rewarded, the competition is friendly. We also encouraged people who had never participated in such an event, felt they couldn't contribute because they weren't engineers, or thought they'd be of no use to participate because it's an event where they could experience things they normally would not.

There are also things that we noticed in conversations. Since the event was held before Christmas, several people were planning to take consecutive holidays or return to their home countries. For this reason, we decided to move the event up a few days. We adjusted the schedule with the instructors of each workshop, and finally set the pre-event for December 14th to 19th, with Innovation Days on December 20th and 21st. This added at least two to three more team members who could participate.

As a side note, since there were only three operating members plus one support member, it was convenient for us to have a weekend in the middle of the event. Hosting the event all week long would have been physically demanding.

Grouping and Pre-work

Thanks to the recruiting efforts, we gathered 30 participants. More than half of the Global Development Group participated, as the group manager, assistant managers, and we operational members were not eligible to participate.

Participants came from various teams such as Business Development, PdM (Product Management), UIUX, Frontend, Backend, Testing, and DevOps. We allocated each team leader based on two conditions: 1) involving people who are not usually involved in the work, and 2) ensuring team leaders were separated to maintain a balance of power. We ended up with 5 people in each of the 6 teams. (The members were perfectly divided because we had a total of 30 participants😊)

The team members were announced on November 18th, and were then given two weeks to review and submit the following information:

• Team name
• Theme of choice
• Team leader

As we are the team that is the most used to interacting cross-functionally in the group, we had concerns about whether the participants would be able to communicate well with each other, or engage actively in the event. However, our worries were unnecessary. As they were participating voluntarily, each team was more proactive than expected, creating their own Slack channels and holding meetings, which gave us hope for future events! 🎉

Review of Preparation

Since we started this project with completely no experience, either within the company or from previous jobs, we had to conduct extensive research and seek advice from various people during the preparation. In particular, the approval process took a long time, but involving the CIO and the president was one of our achievements, and a major factor that we believe will lead to future events.

In addition, we were able to successfully distribute tasks by combining the strengths of each Operations Enhancement Team member, such as idea generation (including research), planning and reporting, and understanding the situation and inspiring team members, which enabled us to implement the project in a short period of about four months from conception.

There were various challenges during the pre-event period and on the day of the event, which will be described in the next article.

Conclusion

By the way, the planning of KUDOS and this event emerged from our daily conversations within the Operations Enhancement Team. We place a high value on conversations and take pride in our ability to go from casual conversation—like suggesting solutions and sharing experiences—to planning, execution, and results.