Learning Through Competition: The Alteryx Data Challenge Playbook

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At Alteryx, we’ve long been fans of learning and innovating through competition. From our decade old annual Grand Prix, to the Broomfield Innovation Days, to running and participating in data challenges and hackathons – as with sport, we feel that a little friendly competition can bring out the best in us.

More and more we’ve seen Alteryx users around the world embracing this ideology, as well. Organizations that dedicate time and resources to internal hackathon-like events see many benefits:

• Teams that form across departments with varied skillsets often produce the most innovative outcomes.
• Paired with training, hackathons and data challenges can help spread a data driven mentality through organizations undergoing digital transformations.
• A little swag and the promise of glory can go a long way toward motivating your workforce to solve impossible-seeming challenges.

We’ve seen many customers succeed with these types of events. Many others, however, don’t know where to begin. To that end, we present the Data Challenge Playbook, accompanied by a series of Competition Templates.

The Data Challenge Playbook

The Data Challenge Playbook goes over three different possible formats for your competition, each with different goals and time commitments:

• The Hackathon: the most popular data challenge format. Give your people a lofty goal, along with the training and tools they need, and you won’t be disappointed with the results.
• The Grand Prix: a competition that rewards raw speed and problem solving under pressure. We’ve seen that people that prepare for this type of competition tend to binge training content and in so doing learn analytics skills at an incredible rate.
• The Kaggle: made famous by the data science community of the same name, this event jump starts the solving of a tough prediction problem that’s been plaguing your organization. The challenge may turn some of your analysts into citizen data scientists.

Read the Playbook to get a taste of what’s possible for your organization with a competitive data event.

Competition Templates

To help you get started, we’ve paired the Playbook with templates and examples for each type of competition.

The Hackathon Template is a document that includes a sample goal, agenda, and other suggestions on how to pull off a successful data challenge. Simply replace the sample goal with the biggest data analytics challenge facing your organization today, and you’re on your way.

For The Grand Prix, find below several sample data challenges, sourced from Alteryx Academy weekly challenges. These challenges are very similar to the ones we give contestants on stage each year at our Inspire user conference.

Challenge	Type	Difficulty
Settle the Score	Data Analysis	Beginner
Credit/Debit Midpoints	Data Analysis	Intermediate
Market Overlap	Spatial Analysis	Intermediate
Solving the Knapsack Problem	Optimization	Advanced

And for The Kaggle, download this sample workflow that poses a hypothetical prediction problem, and includes a macro to measure the challenger’s accuracy on a holdout sample. At the end of the competition, highest accuracy wins! Adapt this workflow to a hard prediction problem your organization is facing.

We hope that with these resources you can encourage your data workers to take their skills to the next level and spread a fever of innovative spirit throughout your organization.

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