I think I won’t be a first person to name a 12h challenge a trial round, a warmup before a famous 24h challenge done by graduating students. A distinctive trait of both these competitions is the variability it offers to the participants – You can’t change the customer’s issue, but you’re completely free in approaching and solving it from any side you see as a winning bet, but most importantly, this challenge tests your team from the perspective of how do you organize the work in the team, who’s responsible for what etc. I personally attended this challenge twice as an ordinary participant, and it was quite an enjoyable experience, but third time was different, as I, and Team Tremia in whole faced the need to do this one more time, but this time, as organizers for our guests – A group of students from Switzerland. And so, here’s the story of it.

How it started?

From the start, the path to a challenge was not easy, as we stumbled upon internal communication issues – At first, we could not find the common vision for the challenge and client for the contact. How many people will join, how many teams do we need? We haven’t understood each other here. There was, however, a vision for the client, but they added controversy with giving two different responses to one question. Thankfully, despite leaving this confusing response, we were provided with a list of alternative clients, who may want to provide us with an issue to resolve, as well as reward the winning team with a prize, but as the time was getting closer to the winter break, lesser time we had to get in contact and reach some kind of agreement. Of course, this strategy didn’t win, and we were left without any client, lost and expecting the worst, until…

What do we do?

…Until one of the members suggested the idea of working on the topic of the upcoming Sales Day – An annual 3 day competition, oriented on the development of the selling skills of the students etc. It can be of great help to us as well as to our guests, which were excited and actively demanded a mutual project. So, what’s left to us? The morale of the small team was low, but we decided to give it a go, and contacted the team with the product idea, which, to our surprise, anticipated our idea, and agreed to assist us in organizing the event in the initial timeframe by providing an issue we can resolve together with the guests, and it will be a mutual benefit for every side of this challenge at the end. After a group video call, we discussed all the sharp corners, distributed the responsibilities of the sides, and started arranging everything and waiting for the Day X.

Let the challenge begin!

Even though we came prepared for the day, it didn’t begin as planned. To begin with, we had to move the introduction part a bit further in a day so that the “client” will be able to come in time. Secondly, we had some technical issues with the presentation. Nonetheless, we divided the people into groups, and after client’s pitch and problem definition, the work begun.

Unlike another organizer from our small group, I decided to voluntarily participate in the activity of one of the groups, so that I can know what the work from the inside in our challenge and have the full picture of the event. This has brought some results – Not only some unexpected organizational issues arose on the way, but also it was identified through a “Scientific” way that the task was a bit easy, as the group quite quickly found possible solutions to the problem and went into stagnation with the further progress. Same could be said about the second team, which took longer time, but after some time started lacking workload and that’s why we agreed to move the pitching time an hour ahead.

Pitching was quite nervous, as I was one of the presenters, but it went smoothly, and both teams received positive feedback firstly from trial pitching in the evening, and afterwards, during the performance in front of the client. For me, the key outtakes of this day were the following:

• Plan everything long in advance, so you will be mostly secured. We were lucky in our case, but in the future, there not only might not be such luck further, but also the quality of the preparation might be hurt severely.
• With good preparation comes better and more interesting problem to be given to the participants, and the better outcome will be.
• Next time, it will be great to think about the way how to make people more engaged with the task, while also not limiting their creativity and freedom too hard.

These are my key outtakes of another 12h challenge from the viewpoint of the organizer.