“From Kickoff to Touchdown: The Play That Changed the Game” is a series of three articles that will illustrate the Nursing Professional Development (NPD) Practice Model, which includes the inputs, throughputs, and outputs. In this first part of the three-part series, we aim to address the inputs taken into consideration to plan a hackathon for improving nursing competency management.

Evaluating nursing competencies is essential to ensure that nurses adhere to the standards established by hospital policies and regulatory agencies. These competencies should be carefully selected to address the needs of our organization and align with its vision.

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Method

Our team conducted an environmental scan for our organization’s nursing competency validation process. Summative evaluations and feedback from the professional development department revealed dissatisfaction with the current competency management process. Feedback from team members and the professional development department indicated that the selected validations were not always relevant to their practice and often served as a "catch-all" for competencies that did not apply to everyone.

Autonomy, accountability, and ownership of practice are key traits that contribute to a nurse's professional development. To encourage ideas for nursing competency management, a hackathon event was chosen as the platform for brainstorming. A hackathon is an event where various roles come together to collaborate to solve a problem or produce a new idea (Yasar et al., 2023). Our organization’s hackathon involved bedside nurses, nursing leaders, and NPD practitioners, allowing all voices to share their perspectives on processes that affect their skill competencies. 

The purpose of the hackathon was to gather ideas for restructuring competency management validation. The overall goal was to create a standardized process that maintains annual competencies per regulatory or policy requirements and can be tailored to meet the competency needs of individual units. To ensure all stages of the competency management process were addressed, the project managers separated the hackathon into four rounds: The planning and staging rounds included competency and validation selection while the validation and conclusion rounds included operationalization of chosen competencies and remediation plan.

Once the hackathon structure was established, project managers secured approval from executive management and NPD practitioners for revision of the existing competency process. Communication regarding the hackathon was distributed to all organization nurses with instructions to submit an application for review by project managers. Applicants were chosen based on criteria and specialty.

After participants were chosen, a “Hacker Kit” was distributed to guide participants on the planned events for the hackathon. The project managers encouraged participants to review the Hacker Kit fully prior to the event, as it discussed the structure of the event, timing of rounds and breaks, purpose of the event, and their roles.

The hackathon event was conducted virtually, where participants received an overview of the day's expectations before being assigned to breakout rooms with equal representation of job role and specialty. Guided by pre-determined topics from the project managers, participants collaborated as a group and presented their ideas to the audience. Participants voted on their top choice based on feasibility and sustainability. The proposed concept with the highest votes would be considered by the NPD department for the future competency management process.

Conclusion

The hackathon proved to be an effective strategy for ensuring that the voices of all specialties and practice areas were heard throughout the process of redesigning nursing competency management, and it was intentionally built on the inputs of the NPD Practice Model, which included environmental scanning, and leveraging our bedside nursing staff and NPD practitioners (Harper & Maloney, 2022). Our planning began with an environmental scan that surfaced both documented gaps and frontline dissatisfaction with a one-size-fits-all validation approach. Those findings were considered alongside required regulatory and policy expectations and our organization’s commitment to delivering the most remarkable patient experience. Just as importantly, we incorporated user input by intentionally engaging NPD practitioners, leaders, and the end users of the process—bedside nursing teams—so that proposed changes reflected the realities of practice across specialties. Altogether, these inputs provided the clarity and shared purpose needed to launch a structured, inclusive hackathon that generated relevant, practical ideas for competency management redesign.

In part two of the series, we will describe how these inputs were transformed through NPD throughputs: the planning, partnership, and decision-making processes that converted environmental and stakeholder data into actionable strategies for a redesigned competency management approach.