Thank God It's Hippo Friday

Hippo has launched a new initiative: the Hippo Friday. A day in which each and every Hippo employee is in the Amsterdam office. No client work is planned in, (project) managers are not allowed to schedule anything on that day.

Stolen from: http://agileconsulting.blogspot.com/ :-)

So, what are we going to do?
That’s up to everyone! At the beginning of a Hippo Friday everyone is able to pitch his/her project, if others like it and are willing to join in, go and do it! There is only one restriction: it needs to have potential to add value to Hippo, its customers or their audience.

Hippo already has 15 full-time employees working in R&D, giving away everything they create. Now the professional services and support departments are joining in, adding another 10% of non-billable time to the already enormous investment in Hippo CMS and our clients. Even so, we are convinced that this will improve our company in many (unforeseen) ways.

Result of a brainstorm session

Why spend this time?

• Unleashing the enormous potential in the Hippo pool;
• Remove restrictions by the full-pressure planning;
• More inter-colleague contact was needed.

We found that with the rising popularity of Hippo consultants it was hard to get everyone in the office at the same time, contact with colleagues was sorely being missed by many. Knowledge was not shared enough. Hippos simply are herd animals :-)

Won’t this hurt customers?

No.

In the short term this measure limits the availability of Hippos from 80 to 72 hours in two weeks and yes, that might not be beneficial to specific projects at specific times. Note that this will never interfere with us helping clients who have a support subscription.

Take the long view and you will see that it will enhance the product, make new features available and improve documentation and processes company wide.

Can you already give some examples?

Well yes, thank you for asking, below a selection of achievements (remember, we’ve only had three Fridays so far)

• HST Config – automated backup and rollback facilities
• Red5 integration
• HTML compatibility checklist
• Selenium integration
• Console improvements
• CMS announcements / messaging
• An internal Wicket-plugin training
• RFP Knowledgebase

[2012 update: we've found that bi-weekly is too much, it made the day "normal" and we've reduced the frequency to once every four weeks]