KIT Hackathon -Intensive 48 hours for all members with different backgrounds-
-Intensive 48 hours for all members with different backgrounds-
-Intensive 48 hours for all members with different backgrounds-
Do you know the word "Hackathon"? Maybe you do, maybe not.
Hackathon is a coined word that combines "hack" and "marathon" and usually indicates an event that software developers such as programmers and designers work on intensively in a short period.
KPMG Ignition Tokyo Inc. (KIT) holds hackathons regularly, all employees, including back-office members, were encouraged to participate. It's an exciting initiative to create a team that transcends nationality, job title, and occupation, and work together within 48 hours to shape our ideas from scratch. At the Hackathon we held the other day, many teams, including members of the back office, participated. Each made a presentation with elaborate ideas from problem raising to a solution.
One of the most "KIT-ish" parts about our Hackathon is that the participants have a different team from their project team that performs regular work, and can develop with the content that they are interested in, regardless of the their assigned regular tasks or work. If you have an own theme that you want to work on during Hackathon, you always can recruit members and form a team based on it. KIT has employees with different career backgrounds such as data scientists, consultants, UX / UI designers, as well as software engineers, cloud engineers. Forming the team with wide diversity in terms of career and culture background is actually a key for our hackathon.
It is also remarkable that back-office members can participate in this event. Most of the members from the back-office have never participated in Hackathon before. However, even though they didn't have enough knowledge of software development, they were all good at documentation and creating videos for presentations and such. Feedback from them after Hackathon was quite positive. They felt they could contribute more than they thought at the beginning. It is also a significant advantage that you can directly see how the development team members work and touch the atmosphere of the members that you do not usually work with.
KIT! Into the Metaverse!
This image shows the development screen of the team that won the Audience Award: The title is "KIT! Into the Metaverse!"
KIT! Into the Metaverse!
The leader of the Audience Award-winning team commented:
"I just joined KIT as a project leader role. It was my first time working at a company that encourages working from home, so I wanted a playful way to interact with my colleagues. It was such an enjoyable event I could discuss intensively with the team on how to share our powerful story with all employees and finally complete the presentation."
We also interviewed one team; they had back-office members.
Back-office member A: "I participated without knowing the meaning of the Hackathon, so I was worried and so nervous whether I could ever be a help for the team, but to be honest, there were a lot of tasks I could work on. It was an excellent experience, and I enjoyed it so much."
Development engineer B: "It's always tough to make something in a short period. Although we had some minor troubles during Hackathon, it was purely enjoyable to do something that I couldn't make in my daily work. The user's perspective of the back-office members was also essential, so I'm glad they were on our team!"
A team including back-office members who talks about their thoughts of the hackathon.
Since its establishment in 2019, KIT has been driving the development of cutting-edge technology based on the slogan "Make the Impossible Possible" with members of various cultures and skills from about 30 countries around the world. We will continue to provide support and opportunities for our employees to work comfortably as well as for each individual to maximize their performance.
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