Power 365 Solutions team recently hosted our first Hackathon on the 22nd of July 2022 at the Shard in London - we teamed up with the inspiring charitable organisation, Bear Us In Mind UK.

Founded out of the crisis in Ukraine in 2022, Bear Us In Mind is an emergency charitable organisation that supports children who have experienced separation, loss and in some cases bereavement by equipping adults with a psychological toolkit to support the child. Bear Us In Mind aims to start and create difficult conversations that have a lasting impact on those children whose lives have been traumatised by war, profound separation and bereavement.

At the hackathon Power 365 split into two teams and were tasked with “hacking” a solution that addressed one of Bear Us In Mind’s three pain points before presenting to all attendees at the end of the day.

One of our Power Platform Consultants Megan Casey explained that “whilst there was a sheer number of opportunities to build out a range of different solutions leaning on the Microsoft stack, as a team we decided to go with simplicity and built out the ‘out of the box’ lead generation process from lead all of the way through to work order, making the most of D365 for Sales and Field Service. Our vision was to show off Microsoft’s key functionality without straying too far away from the underlying process.”

The opposing team adopted a bespoke approach, Alex Ward from the other team explained that “the solution chosen by our team was to take the out of the box Dynamics Sales product and customise it to their specific needs. The process BUIM followed to send out boxes was closely aligned with a typical Lead to Opportunity sales process, whereby they would gather the necessary information required before allocating a certain amount of boxes to a particular person or organisation. The functionality of Products and Product Bundles within Dynamics Sales also meant they could customise the contents of these boxes for particular Opportunities, and on top of that enable them to create pre-defined 'mini boxes' which we knew was a future requirement for them.”

We found the experience inspiring, and stimulating and enjoyed seeing the innovative ideas and fast-paced thinking that led to different solutions being built. Ultimately the Project Manager at Bear Us In Mind, Eloise Gordon Lennox, decided that the bespoke approach best fitted their charitable organisation and commented that “the P365 hackathon has shown me the necessity of a software solution to enhance our progress and growth”.  

We would like to thank Bear Us In Mind for attending our hackathon. And we look forward to taking part in and hosting future hackathons.

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