12%-time

12% Time is an innovation program wherein employees dedicate approximately 12% of their work week (typically four hours out of a 32-hour workweek) to pursue projects of personal interest that could potentially benefit the company. This concept is adapted from Google's 20% time concept.

Goals

12% Time creates structured slack in employees' schedules. This has two primary goals:

1. force us to create slack in project schedules, that can be consumed when time runs over.
2. allow for more experimentation and creativity that might not naturally come up in projects.

Slack in projects is important. A fully utilized project (or team) is virtually guaranteed to fail to meet its deadlines: any small delay during a project would cause you to violate the deadline. One of the ways we build ensure slack is included in our workweek, is by booking up to 4 hours every week of 12% time. Yes, that's actually 12,5% of your 32-hour workweek, but the shorter name has stuck.

Second 12% time allows for experimentation and learning outside our regular projects. The availability of work shapes projects. It might benefit Delft Solutions to have you know React, but a React-based project might not come up for months. 12% time allows for learning React on your terms. Or we might want a new plugin to calculate vacation hours in Kimai, but can't create a project for that. You could build it in 12% time. 12% time allows for exploration of new ideas, innovation outside of your daily responsibilities, skill development, and potential development of new products or features.

Doing 12% time at Delft Solutions

1. What to work on:
   1. Choose your own topics & projects. Noone assigns you 12% work. While others might have suggestions, you decide how to allocate time.
   2. You can work on things over multiple weeks, or
2. How to budget time:
   1. Limit your 12% time to 4 hours per week over a long term average. It's okay to spend more or less time on 12% time per week, it doesn't have to be exactly 4 hours.
   2. Try to stick closely to four hours per week though; having you do 0-0-0-16 hours in a month would defeat goal 1 of having slack every week.
   3. Do not catch-up on 'missed' 12% time. If a week was quite busy, the work consumes the 12% time as a buffer, as it was intended. The next week, just do 4 hours rather than 8 hours on 12% time.
   4. If you miss 12% multiple weeks in a row, especially when you do so as the whole team, bring it up as a topic for the weekly retrospective. It's an early sign that we might be overbooked w.r.t. capacity.
3. Planning when to take 12% time:

choose your own topic do this at the end of the week, once work is done preferably not in the weekend demo your work or share learnings Friday