Innovation Day

Every so often, people raise the idea of tech companies having an Innovation Day. So maybe every Friday, people can put down their usual work, and do a personal project instead; maybe using a language they aren’t familiar with. Sometimes we have explored this idea, but usually just for one or two days.

I’m always skeptical, because I often find fixing a bug, or making a simple feature will take a day or two, often even longer. To expect some kind of prototype in such a limited time always seems an impossible ask to me.

Recently, a group of people have been allowed to have a full Innovation Day each week. I was speaking to one of the guys and he was saying that they plan to stop it since one day a week isn’t enough time. A month quickly goes by and that’s only 4 days work.

When the innovation is supposed to be meaningful and integrated into new projects, these new projects will have come a long way and then it’s awkward to utilise it. Recently there have been projects that have been scrapped or required a major overhaul because of ideas that have either come out of the Innovation Day, or by some idea someone suddenly had. The earlier people know about requirements, the easier it is to integrate into the project. Trying to implement it later is hard, or even impossible; so the project gets scrapped and they all start again.

Another problem with just having a single day is that you could book that day off as annual leave, or maybe you are ill. If it is a team thing, what happens if someone has the day off and you end up being on your own?

Anyway, I was low on work, so thought I’d pay a visit to a particular pair of developers that were working on a feature relevant to my project. Turns out one of them was ill, and one of them had some important meetings in the morning so would be a few hours late.

Anyway, I end up meeting him and we had problems getting the previous week’s changes to build. There were quite a few people missing from the overall group too, and some developers seemed to take an overly long lunch break – like 1.5 hours. Then when they did return, they ended up switching conversation between work and banter, so much so; that I reckon they only were productive half the afternoon.

So how much benefit can a day a week really be? It’s seems unreasonable to expect zero complications and 100% efficiency, so it seems a waste of time.

I was speaking to another colleague about the Innovation Day and he was surprised that it was limited to a select group of people. He said entire teams should be innovating so they buy in to the ideas, rather than someone else saying “I did this in the Innovation Day, so your team should do it too”. It also links back to the comments on time; that you don’t want a team to have got so far into the project, then be told to rewrite it with a different style architecture.