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

Heh

[Neil Blender]

Who doesn't spend at least 20% of their workday doing things other than work?

Re:Heh

[Peyna]

They probably figured: "We can let our employees slack off 20% of the time, or pretend like we're 'encouraging' their independent works while at the same time eliminating that slack time."

So you've made your employees happier which makes them more productive, and you've taken something wasted (slack time) and turned into something useful (creative/moral boosting time).

Re:Heh

[Cheesy Fool]

Probably more than that. To quote Office Space:

~ Well, generally I come in at least twenty minutes late, I sneak in through the backdoor so Lumberg won't see me, then for the next hour I just kinda space out.
~ Space out?
~ Yeah, I just kinda stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working... I'd say in a given week I do about, oh, 15 minutes of real, actual work.

Re:Heh

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Are you kidding? My job description includes "...Stay up to date on network and techology developments..."

It just so happens that most of my leads include "Userfriendly", Fark.com, and /.

Re:Heh

[joabj]

Google has a bit of a specialized workforce--people who are creative and smart. I'm not sure how well it would work elsewhere, with people who are just punching the clock and holding no interest in work-related projects.

Re:Heh

[hoggoth]

> Mastadon hunting parties probably stopped to bathe in the brook and wrestle each other under water

I, for one, welcome our new homo-erotic Elephant killing cavemen overlords.

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.

[Fnkmaster]

Umm, not all bosses have pointy hair. I've certainly heard of small companies with similar, if slightly less radical incentives to employees to do creative, entrepreneurial kinds of things. Basically, the issue is the more freedom you give your employees, the better they need to be. If you tell a slacking idjit that he can spend 20% of his time pursuing his "own interests" you can forget about that 20% of his time doing anything useful for the company.

Major corporations don't usually have the calibre of employees across the board to make this sort of system work. They have evolved large bureaucracies as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent.

So I'd agree with a PHB at a major corporation, this probably would be a bad idea for his company.

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.

Re:Google is pretty unique.

[jimicus]

It's the poor carpenter who blames his tools.

Some might say it's an equally poor carpenter who tries to get through the day with lousy tools.

Re:Google is pretty unique.

[Jerf]

You're both right.

Bureaucracies are a way of slamming everybody to a common standard with reasonable reliability. It is a low, but predictable level of capability, and frankly, that has its uses. It is also easy to set up, and we seem to have some almost instinctual knowlegde of how to set them up.

They aren't optimal in all situations and they are overapplied, but they have their place. I for one wouldn't care to have a criminal justice system that wasn't a bureaucracy; predictability in a legal system is very important. Yes, even when it is wrong... then you at least know something needs to be fixed. To use a Slashdot-type example, at least we know the patent system is broken. If the rulings were more random (at all levels, from the Patent Office to judges), it would be even harder to tell... and ultimately we'd be even worse off and the first order of business would be to establish some consistency! (Consistency is one of those things that you can have contempt for because you're so used to it, you don't realize how important it is; "familiarity breeds contempt". I'd rather have the current system than a random one, and I hate the current system. For instance, a random system would give an even greater advantage to the deep-pocketed company; they could just keep re-trying various suits until the dice came up their way. The system as it is allows some of that, but you'd see even more in a random world.)

The big problem with Bureaucracies is that one of the biggest counter-indications for its use is "managing a creative enterprise", and that's where we hear most of the bitching about it. The problem here, ultimately, isn't truly Bureaucracy itself; it is working as it always does. It is the application of an inappropriate organization system; you always pay for that, no matter what. Unfortunately, all other forms are more expensive (thought of in the proper economic terms, even Anarchy is more expensive; the communication issues necessary to behave in a coordinated fashion become intractable), and like I said, we seem to have some sort of Bureaucracy instinct, so they also have to be learned explicitly, which is another barrier to their use.

But ultimately, "[large bureaucracies evolved] as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent" and "they prevent work and progress which results in 'mediocre talent.'"... when misused, which they probably are a majority of the time.

I just start doing it

[Botunda]

And then when they see the results they usually are quite happy.

Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[suso]

That is a great idea and I think you will get a lot of brownie points from your employees that care about such things. But make sure you enforce what they can work on. Some people might use it as an oppurtunity to start another business that competes with your own, which might not be what you had in mind.

I think that if a lot of businesses had this kind of open mind it would surely help open source software.

Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[eln]

Of course, if they're starting their own business on company time with company equipment, even if the activity is nominally "independent," they'll soon find out that their new side business is actually their employer's new side business.

Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[tverbeek]

Mod parent up.

If you do this, you need to make it crystal clear ahead of time who will own the results of their time spent noodling. Ordinarily, what you do with company resources on company time while an employee belongs to the company. The situation of a company formally giving employees "permission" to do whatever they want might muddy the waters legally, but it certainly muddies them in people's minds. Put the policy in writing and make people sign off on it.

Likewise, you need guidelines for what kinds of projects they can spend that 20% on; i.e. obvious dead-ends with no value to the company?, surfing the web?, etc.

Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start

[MerlynEmrys67]

if you insist they be work-related

Well - actually not. Why limit projects to current businesses. You might hit a few singles/doubles here - but if you really want your people swinging for the fences, let them dream and create completely new business oportunities for the company.

Go see how Post-it-Notes were created... I guess you can say 3M was in the glue/adhesive business, but really - a completely new business for them (I believe it is even "material" to their earnings)

Fridays are your day!

[chris09876]

I worked at a company in Quebec awhile back that had a similar policy. Each Friday, you were allowed to work on your own projects. About once each month, we had a small group presentation where we told other people in our group what we'd been working on, and how it's progressing. When the group decided that the idea was mature enough to tell others about, we gave a small presentation to the managers. They talked it over for a bit, and decided if it would be pursued further, or if we should find something else to work on. I found it quite nice to be able to work on my own things. I never made anything great, but a number of people had small teams put under them to help them work on their idea :)

Time Management for Dummies

[eln]

If you have management that will actually allow you to do this, then it's real simple. The project manager will take projected timelines for your required projects, and add 20%. If you work efficiently, you'll end up with 20% of your time free to work on independent projects.

As for managing your own time, it's easy: The required projects always come first. If you slack on your required projects, or you badly underestimate your timeline, then you don't get any time to work on your independent stuff. On the other hand, if you bust your ass on your required project and end up ahead of schedule, then you may get more than 20% of your time to work on independent projects.

After that, the only difficult thing is to convince upper management that it's worthwhile to let people work on independent projects rather than just piling on more requirements when it looks like people are ahead of schedule. Depending on the upper management, this may range from easy to completely impossible to do.

Two words

[savagedome]

My company wants to increase creativity and innovation

Two words: Massage Bunnies

Nothing much. They just rub your shoulders after you've been sitting there pondering on the problem at hand (no pun) for long. It relaxes you.

It helps if they are wearing a tutu.

Your company has deeper problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight... Your company wants to increase creativity and innovation yet can't even decide for itself how to "implement" independent thinking time?

And you go as far as asking slashdot how to copy google's infrastructure... how original and creative!

TPS Reports

[Saxerman]

I worked for a company where we needed to write up weekly time accounting reports. These WTA (TPS?) reports were expected to account for 40 hours, of which around 8 should be on personal 'horizon expansion' projects. This could be anything from surfing web sites related to new information, reading books, attending classes, writing code in new languages, etc.

The idea being it was time devoted to thinking outside the box, such as trying new ways to do old things. Billable projects still came first, so this wasn't a hard and fast rule, and for the most part I just used it to account for my time spent on /. :)

Innovation vs. Laziness

[_Sambo]

Our company framed this concept a little differently so that it was more palatable to management. Each of us was to spend 20% of our time in "Process Improvement" initiatives. (Sounds very dry and corporate)

In reality it was a nice juicy chance to make great changes that would help the company in operations. We measured the time by hours per day. One hour per eight hour day was to be used independently. At our weekly meetings, ideas were discussed and progress was measured.

The nice thing about this was that it was voluntary. As there was no fincial incentive or reward for creativity, the time itself became the incentive. You could do whatever you wanted for that hour be it surf slashdot or play everquest.

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.

Re:I used to do this anyway...

[AGTiny]

You just need 1 open TCP port to enable an SSH connection to your home machine via your firewall's port forwarding. Then you can create any number of SSH port forwards to handle any kind of traffic you like. As a bonus, it's AES encrypted so your boss can't spy on it. :)

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.