Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace?

An anonymous reader asks: "My company wants to increase creativity and innovation, we our thinking of implementing a Google like policy of 20% of your time for independent projects but I can't find any details on how Google actually implements this. I am curious how they divvy up their time (1 day a week or 1 week a month)? How do you keep your real project from impacting it? At what point are the projects reviewed? Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?"

Comments

Google is pretty unique.

[FortKnox]

I don't see any major corporations thinking this is a good investment. I don't see many PHB's going along with this idea, regardless of how successful Google is with it.

Re:Google is pretty unique.

[Kevin_Cedrone]

I think 3M has a program similar to this. They call it their "15 Percent rule". It's not clear whether the employees are paid for the research, but it's pretty clear from this link that employees are encouraged to work on independent projects.

One of my engineering profs worked for 3M and said that there was no push to identify or disclose the projects you worked on in this 15%, much less justify them to superiors.

I'm guessing a flexi-time system.

[jd]

The simplest flexi-time system you can implement is a time-card system. You swipe into a specific role and then the work you do is considered within that role. Alternatively, you can do much the same thing with time-cards.

At NASA, I was on a time-card system, and specified how much time I put in for each of the projects I was doing. The total time had to come to 80 hours for the fortnight. Overtime was prohibited, so if you worked over the 80 hours, you had to take a negative amount of vacation. (The total amount of vacation left went up as a result.) Also, if you left an hour early one day, you left an hour late sometime in the fortnight and simply "borrowed" that hour of vacation until you paid it back.

Projects also had a certain number of hours alloted to them, so if one project was running behind and another ran ahead, it was common practice to "borrow" time.

I imagine Google does something similar, where you have pools of time and can transfer between pools in order to obtain the time you need to do your independent project.

Such mechanisms are very primitive, largely because businesses have almost always operated on a very formal, rigid structure. Person A does task B for C hours a day, rain or shine. With no need for fancier time-management tools, nothing much has been developed. Flexi-time is probably the best system out there for this kind of thing, right now.

20% Time at Google.

[chrisd]

20% time works pretty simply, you identify a project you want to work on, write up a design doc and have that be your 20% time. You can also put your work into an existing project at Google. You can also bunch up 20% time and take it all at once or in larger chunks than 1 day a week or whatever. Of course, Google engineers are expected to make sure that thier 80% projects are in a good place, but we trust each other to make those kinds of decisions. The trust is what makes 20% time work for everyone.

There are some caveats, but that's the broad strokes. News.google.com, Orkut and a bunch of stuff on labs came from 20% time.

Chris

How Google really does it

[RichG]

I have a friend who's an Uber Tech Lead (I am not making that up) at Google and he told me how it works in practice:

Everyone gets their 1 day a week to work on whatever they want, *however*, in reality at Google you're slammed working on your project like anywhere else. Therefore, on Friday, you really need to finish patching that security hole in Gmail, so you 'bank' your time. Once your project lets up a bit, you withdraw your time and take n days to work on your personal project.

It seems like this is a fairly practical system for software development, which goes in waves of heavy work and then light times of regrouping and gathering requirements. The 20% gets used during those times when you'd otherwise be waiting for the next big thing to hit.

The interesting thing about Google is that people work to gather other 20%ers onto your 20% project, thereby increasing your project and hopefully eventually presenting it to mgmt for work as a real project (Orkut and Gmail started this way). If you can't gather others onto your 20% project, you're encouraged to find another project... :)

Anyway, I wish I could implement this system at my work, but my PHBs think it's "wasted time" and given our quarter-to-quarter existence, spending that 20% on customer issues is probably a better use of time, at least for the short-term.