It's always good to look at successful organisations and try to learn from some of their practices/experience. Some time ago we looked at Google and their '20% time' for engineers. Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their time free to work on what they are really passionate about. As well as hopefully making Google a better place to work for their engineers (not that it would have been that bad any way!) a number of successful Google products have emerged as a result of this initiative.
I recently attended a 'breakfast seminar' where Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian talked about his company. Atlassian have just started a 20% time trial of their own. On the Atlassian blog you can find out all the details of this trial, how it works, why they are doing it etc but what is really interesting is the open and very public approach they are taking with it. Atlassian staff are being encouraged to blog everything about the trial, what works, what doesn't, how they feel about it etc. While we know about Google's 20% time and what some of the products that have emerged from it are, Mike argues we don't really know much about how it works in practice. Atlassian are going to find out for themselves and let the world know through their blog. This will be very interesting to follow and I look forward to seeing the blog posts appearing in their developer blog.
Atlassian estimate that their trial is going to cost US$1,000,000 - a serious investment given the size of their company. At education.au we have quite a number of software engineers and it would be great to adopt this sort of practice as well. In addition to software engineers we have quite a number of professionals from Education and Training who, if given 20% of their time to devote to something they are passionate about, would no doubt end up adding a lot of value to our company. The reality of course for us is that quite simply, this is not going to happen. We are not in a position to do something like this but what sort of organisations are? Take Google and Atlassian for example. Both are successful technology companies that have the financial capacity to implement such programs. One is publicly listed and one is private. Is it feasible or even acceptable for say, not for profit organisations or government departments to try similar programs? How about other professions and trades? Surely software engineers are not the only ones who can benefit from and add value back to their organisations and customers through such initiatives. Think about your job for a moment - what could you do if you were given a day a week to do something related to your work that you are passionate about and what sort of benefits would ultimately come back to your organisation and its customers?
The 'catch 22' for me is that in order for us to be in a position to do this, we would already had to have done it successfully and be reaping the benefits to be in a position to do it!