Business Cantina
American Airlines HackWars 2019
Formal engagement of business units in American Airline's HackWars. Allowing for cross functional business experts to provide competing teams with real time feedback and guidance on hackathon ideas and concepts.
How it started
American Airlines started its own hackathon event in 2013. Since then it has grown to have 1,000 developers competing in a 24 hour event where teams can focus on building any product that can potentially benefit the company, customers, and employees.
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In the beginning the focus was on inviting only IT employees. However, in 2018 I was able to miraculously be added to a team as a "business" subject matter expert. Unfortunately, my team did not want to work on my ideas because it involved some emerging technology that they were not comfortable with. But they were good ideas, so now what?
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Well after the event I got in touch with the IT Emerging Technology manager who was in charge of organizing the event and asked if at HackWars 2019 I could have a table with a table tent that said "Business." Then I could help provide business guidance and feedback to teams without being bound to only one team. He was able to connect me with an amazing coworker from his team and together we built out the Business Cantina concept.
Results
To setup this event with the new addition of formal business participation we gathered over 115 problems in the form of "How might we" statements from the 12 business units participating. We created an idea generator in Slack where teams could select a business unit and see the problem statements specific to that business unit, or they could do a random search. Either way, they were able to start thinking about the different areas within the company that could be improved.
With the business formally engaged in the process AA went from having 1 or 2 plausible products to 10 winning teams in for the "idea" category. But there were probably many more ideas that American was able to benefit from. There may have only been enough prizes for 10 teams, but many of the Business Cantina experts mentioned they were taking a number of ideas back to action, regardless of where that idea placed in the competition.
Feedback
Word on the Street
Let me add my thanks as well for the fabulous new addition to HackWars. I know it was fairly exhausting (and I know some of you even lost your voice!) but you really helped educate your counterparts and as a result there were more solutions to real issues we face today. Great work all!
CIO
I'd also like to give a special shout out to Stephanie Binger, who had a vision to create a Business Cantina to connect a Business Unit with the teams as they work through their design and solution process. Once they were in the Cantina, teams could discuss various ideas and validate their concept, including receiving feedback on how their idea could potentially benefit American. There were 12 business units from across the company, including AAdvantage, CEID/Airports, Ancillary, Cargo, Customer Care and more. It was a great success and will be a part of future HackWars.