Innovation in Scrum: The plus 1 week

Scrum is all about delivering business value for the customer, delivering it in the shortest time possible with high quality. This is what your team strives for sprint after sprint. So what happens after you've been doing sprint after sprint for a year? Surely you have delivered a lot of great value for your customer but what about innovation for your product? Innovating often requires time to try out new technologies, improve your work flow processes, and invest in what you're already doing. You can try to do this via a research story or a spike but often doesn't give you the focus to create one great improvement.

My team's used a technique we called, "The plus one week". This technique comes from Mike Cohn's book Agile Estimating and Planning. This technique allows your team time to recharge and focus on improving the process. This improvement may come in the form of tools that speed the delivery of tasks that were previously done manually, or to investigate some new technology direction, or trying out a new interesting feature the Product Owner hadn't requested.

Each team member would pick one or two projects that they could complete within the week's time. They would then work independently during the week and at the end of the week we would hold a "Show N Tell" session where we would invite all of the other scrum teams to see the work that was done. It made for some very interesting sessions; many of the ideas that were generated ended up in the product as a new feature. One idea ended up being it's own product. In the end it was highly successful for the team and the product to invest in the plus one week.

I've heard some comments that managers are worried that the plus one week would be misused and the engineers would spend the week surfing the web and watching YouTube. What we found in reality was that the team looked forward to this time to work on pet projects and that having the end of week demo focused them like any other deadline.