As yet another briefing session with colleagues gets postponed due to client work commitments, it gets me to thinking about how client-centred organisations can make the time to improve and innovate.
I saw a presentation recently about how Google innovate. At the centre of their philosophy is the 20% time – one fifth of all the time that Google engineers have available is to persue personal projects. From that, commercial products spin out. But R&D time in a product-centric organisation can be fairly easily accommodated (as Google's sliding shipping dates testify!).
Move that into a client-centred organisation, though, and it becomes problematic. My team has a half-hour, all team catch up every two weeks. It has to be in the middle of the UK working day in an attempt to allow both my New York and Hong Kong team members to try to attend via WebEx, but even that “0.6% time” is frequently interrupted by pressing, urgent issues.
When you are providing paid-for services to your clients, it's very difficult to be able to interrupt work for staff development, training or service innovation initiatives.
Maybe technology can help here – and for those willing to learn and engage, asynchronous collaboration tools from Twitter upwards can provide ways of enabling time at the times it can fit into individual's diaries. I'm about to launch a group to help people to share experiences of using the Google services. It will be interesting to see, first of all, who signs up, and then who might actually contribute…
mmitII 