This is part one in our Pega Community Hackathon profile series. In this series we profile 2021 Hackathon participants and ask them about their process for creating top-performing applications.
If there’s one thing that the Pega Community Hackathon team could agree on after reviewing 80+ applications from over 640 participants around the world, it’s that it wasn’t easy to pick a Best in Show winner!
After much deliberation, our judging panel awarded the top prize in this year’s Pega Community Hackathon to the Sproute team from srcLogic, a Pega Ventures company based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Sproute is an application that enhances opportunities for employee growth, team morale, and corporate culture through Next-Best-Action guidance.
Five of Sproute’s six developers might look familiar to those of you who participated or followed along during our inaugural Pega Community Hackathon last year. That’s because they were all part of srcLogic’s Pyra team that took home the Runner Up award during the 2020 edition of the Hackathon.
So what inspired this srcLogic team to follow up their Pyra submission and take their Pega expertise to the next level through the creation of Sproute? It all started with an annual review process.
“srcLogic’s review process is important for our company’s growth, but the process can also be time consuming and does not always provide as much information as it could,” explained Sproute team member Amanda Shekarchi. “We decided to model our hackathon application around a modified version of our internal employee annual review process. Our team decided this would be a good opportunity to continue our learning with the Digital Experience APIs and a react frontend. We also found new ways to incorporate decisioning and Next-Best-Action features to make the application both smarter and more efficient.”
Any team has to overcome their fair share of adversity in order to ultimately reach their goals. For these developers from srcLogic, their main challenges were trying to upskill their knowledge of Pega technologies while simultaneously designing an application for the Hackathon.
“We had to balance the amount of functionality that our team wanted to include in our submission and the limited amount of time we had to do it,” recalled Sproute team member and Pega CLSA Emily Camardo. “None of us had any experience with Pega decisioning and data flows. That meant we had to use Pega Academy in order to learn the concepts that were necessary to implement in our application. We overcame this by doing a good job prioritizing what we wanted to include and specializing what each team member worked on.”
The result of their efforts was a Best in Show award of $5,000 and a collective sense of accomplishment from learning new skills and achieving a successful outcome.
“This was a great opportunity for our team to explore Pega features we don’t use on a daily basis,” Camardo concluded, “It was so much more fun and rewarding that way.”
You can find additional posts in the Pega Community Hackathon 2021 profile series below:
- How CrisOS is using Pega to help people in need
- How Farm Easy is changing the future of farming
- How Aaseya is helping small businesses overcome the pandemic
Recommended resources:
- Read more about our Community Hackathon here, or read our press release.
- Check out srcLogic's winning submission.
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