There's nothing quite like the intensity of a 48hr Hackathon to test a teams productivity and their execution speed for the Form, Storm, Norm and Perform team development cycle. It's an environment where the collaboration is fast paced and needs tools that are up to the challenge.
Laughing Mind recently partnered with a team of complete strangers as part of the Melbourne 'Hacking Ageing' Hackathon, hosted by Health XL at the Carlton Connect Initiative CoWorking space in July, 2015. We were tasked to come up with a response to one of three key Aged Care sector challenges: Dementia Care, Loneliness+Physical Inactivity, Malnutrition. For many of the team, this was their first opportunity to be exposed to a range of tools from the Atlassian stack. I was there with my Health Professional and Atlassian Ecosystem partner hats on, knowing some of the sector challenges and what might be possible with targeted focus. |
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Confluence: For product scoping, documenting target audience market research and as an all-in-one-place repository for team products. We then bolstered it with the following add-on products to enhance our product needs analysis, business model and wireframe development:
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Comala Canvas: for Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas blueprints
- Gliffy: For use-case and persona exploration to confirm needs, function points
- Balsamiq: For wireframe mockups for mobile devices (tablets, smartphones)
JIRA: Whilst provisioned, task allocation wasn't needed whilst we clustered in one spot as a co-located team; if we had been faced with the challenge of co-ordinating tasking with a larger team, this would definitely have been used, but team size played in our favour on this occasion.
Hackathon Outcomes
- A fantastic Product Development guy in Mike Ebinum from Seed Digital;
- A nimble + experienced App Development partner with cross-platform development capability;
- Opportunities beyond the Hackathon;
- Refinement opportunities in the platform provisioning model to feedback to Atlassian;
- Addressable market opportunities of Dementia Caregivers in a Consumer Directed Care model, making services easier to find and engage;
- Integration opportunities with IBM Watson and Bluemix for some targeted Cognitive Computing feature sets.
5min Q+A - views from the team
What was your awareness of Atlassian products before we met?
Aware if it, but almost no experience using it.
None. On the projects I worked we use platforms such as Slack.
We were more communication oriented. But I had never heard of Atlassian before,
Some familiarity with Jira (ticketing, change management) – no real experience of Confluence UX.
Having a single place in which to deposit all information, The ease of sharing information, Confluence’s ability to manage multiple edits.
The platform in general is pretty cool.
I was surprised at the degree of effectiveness..Confluence.. introduced..how quickly it brought us together collaboratively ie. there was no need to go looking for things, there was a place and space for new content which was immediately shared (by doing nothing further) with everyone involved.
Make sure you get at least 10 minutes worth of overview / training before jumping in.
I like it. I use it for all my projects. BUT be patient in learning how to use it.
Yet, as I used it, I needed to learn how to use it. Not 100% intuitive.
Once you know the tricks that can be really complicated it's better.
I think it is a fantastic opportunity. What I’m looking for is enterprise reliability and a great user experience, the Atlassian platform seems to address both. There would appear to be a number of ‘hidden gems’ and talking to someone who knows the product back to front to help would be my recommendation. I’m quite comfortable trusting the platform...would be comfortable recommending to peers.
#HXLHACK Memorable #hackathon w @ViaAppsOz @PedroRosasMex + Mike from @seeddigitalco Gr8 team. @DeveloperSteve pix pic.twitter.com/p1iFOIc2hE
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) July 13, 2015
.@Health_xl #hxlhack overview and solutions here: http://t.co/GpcW7WQMqq @aging20 #a2coverage
— Stephen Johnston (@sdbj) July 23, 2015