Building better futures
Our first Digital Discovery Week
13 Nov 2020 - Estimated reading time: 2 mins
Contributing Authors
With 21 sessions, 40 speakers, 4 hackathons, 1 learn to code workshop, 1 social extravaganza and more than 150 attendees over 3 days. Our first Digital Discovery Week was an ambitious initiative. We wanted to bring everyone working across our digital team together to share insights on our ground-breaking technology, develop and enhance their digital skills and understand the tools essential to managing a digital business.
At any one time you will find our teams working on a range of digital projects. Our specialists include data scientists, modellers, technical architects, developers and UX designers, analysts and consultants – each supporting the creation and commercialisation of transformative digital solutions. Digital Discovery Week gave us a platform, and some dedicated space and time, to showcase all the best bits. The most difficult thing – with only 21 sessions we still had to leave some good stuff out!
Steve Hood, who founded Digital Discovery Week explains more…
We had a number of goals for Digital Discovery Week, all of which were met. We wanted to make the space and time for our digital community to come together to share knowledge and celebrate our successes – perhaps something it is easy to neglect while we all work remotely. We also wanted the sessions to educate and challenge attendees, leading to a more effective digital community and personal growth opportunities for all. Taken all together, Digital Discovery Week will support the increasing digital maturity of our team.
Everyone thinks organising events like this is difficult. What I found was, with a group of speakers so willing to take the time out to share their knowledge and expertise with their colleagues, the event essentially ran itself (just don't tell Simon!)
Steve Hood - Founder of Digital Discovery Week
Commenting on Digital Discovery Week, our new Chief Digital Officer, Simon Mortimer says:
“It was a fantastic 3 days. Lots of great content from our speakers and loads of discussion and interaction from those attending the sessions. It might not have been the intention, but Digital Discovery Week has showcased for me the incredibly talented team that we have here at Hymans Robertson..."
I’m delighted that the board was happy to back this investment in everyone’s personal digital development.
Simon Mortimer - Chief Digital Officer
Feedback from the digital community at Hymans has also been great.
One of the attendees, Chelsea Douglas (Business Applications Specialist), said:
“Having over 20 different sessions to choose from it was a challenge in itself to cherry pick which ones to sign up too. I deliberately chose sessions that weren’t directly related to my role, I did this because I wanted to gain a better understanding of how different business areas operate in Hymans as well as having the opportunity to explore other interests…."
The Data Visualisation Hackathon was probably my favourite. Getting to work with different people across the firm and experiment with new tools and a new programming language was really good fun!
Chelsea Douglas - Business Applications Specialist
You can read Chelsea’s blog in full here.
The feedback on Digital Discovery Week has been really positive. The opportunities that Digital Discovery Week delivered in terms of working together more closely and the investment in sharing our expertise will help us to develop better digital tools, apps, APIs and software. We will continue creating transformative digital solutions and building better futures as we look forward to 2021 and more Digital Discovery Weeks!
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