There's an easter egg in our implementation of Scrum at FP: we call it "gold cards".

Summary:

1. Regular time for R&D benefits our business and our staff;
2. The system isn't abused; if anything, we have to persuade staff to take advantage of it;
3. Running the business in fixed timeboxes and tracking velocity is what lets us do this;
4. Why restrict it to designers, developers and QA?

Effectively, they're a watered-down version of the Google "20% time" scheme: in every sprint, everyone at FP gets to take a day working on something of their own devising; with 2-week sprints, this works out as 10% of our time spent on R&D. We factor the time they take into our velocity calculations, so these days are included in our planning and accounted for.

Doing this as a service business is something I've found tricky before, both at FP and in my past life at Good Technology. It's really hard to justify "taking a day" out when there's paid work to be done, and even under our current scheme we see gold cards being taken far more often at the start of sprints (when the pressure is slightly less) than at the end. Far from being a drain on resource, I find myself actually having to remind our team that yes, gold cards are still something available to them and yes, you really ought to take one this sprint. Even so, they're skipped more often than they're taken. Duncan, the agile coach who helped us introduce Scrum, warned us that this might happen: what do you know, people have a conscience and feel they ought to concentrate on "the day job" :)

Not only does it feel good as an employer to be able to put my hand on my heart and say we have, and actively promote, such a scheme... but providing an explicit time for playful experimentation scratches lots of itches, is good for morale, lets folks show off a little (in much the same way as a Hack Day), develops new skills, opens up possibilities for collaboration between folks who may not have worked together on a "live" project, and has resulted in all sorts of goodies, including:

• Our first Android and iPhone experiments, where we first started playing with these devices;
• A suite of simple, skinnable Android games which we're doing some experiments with - more on that soon;
• GPS tools which let us track paths and generally get familiar with co-ordinate systems and location technology - in the name of assisting a couple of keen geocachers, I suspect;
• 3D J2ME apps!
• A Faraday cage, still passing through QA;
• Dougie's entry into the 5k app competition;
• A couple of company-wide talks (on context-driven testing techniques and UI design for the iPhone);
• The worlds first accelerometer-powered spirit level for J2ME phones :)

We don't direct what a gold card day can be used for, but we do prefer to end up with something demonstrable yet sketchy, as opposed to "1% of something that will be amazing one day, but can't be seen yet". To steer in this direction, we make a habit of gold cards being demonstrated during the sprint review meeting at the end of sprints. We don't allow gold cards if you've taken holiday during a sprint or if you work part-time, and we've only explicitly cancelled them just once, during our trip to China earlier this year: it seemed a bit rude to be flown to the other side of the world and then take time out for R&D :)

I'm happy with the results. We have a flow of "new stuff" which is learned and shown around every couple of weeks, some early prototypes which we quite often end up demoing to prospective clients, and we've managed to accommodate all this alongside paid work for clients. I don't know how we would've justified the time without having fixed timeboxes and regular re-planning days; when we've tried to do this pre-Scrum, it's never seemed possible... there's always been a good reason not to take today for R&D.

Next steps? So far it's only designers, developers and QA who've taken advantage of this scheme; I'm curious as to what some of our commercially-minded folks might make with it. And I'm digging into what the tax implications of this scheme might be, in relation to the legendary UK government "R&D tax credits" scheme...

So, prompted by our advisory board, Mr Falletti and I have been rewriting the business plan for FP. I've been surprised at how interesting it's been, but - in the interests of testing assumptions - would be interested in thoughts anyone reading this has on a few observations we've made. Some are (hopefully) blindingly obvious, others may be slightly more contentious:

• The web industry is moving towards mobile. The web services industry (i.e. digital agencies and the like) will likely follow.
• Consumers are becoming more comfortable consuming pure-digital content. Where music led, print and film are following.
• Applications have experienced a popular resurgence, predominately on iPhone but shortly elsewhere. Long-term they are a viable route for delivering services.
• iPhone has convinced service providers that targeting a few high-value but niche audiences is a workable strategy in some situations.
• Operators are slowly losing ground to device vendors, to whom end-users have always shown more loyalty. The industry is being redefined by fresh entrants (Apple, Google, Palm, RIM) who, whilst clearly pursuing their own agendas, are proving more convincingly "open" than operators have been.
• Mobile advertising has been about to arrive for nearly a decade. Whilst budgets are still low, there's plenty of room for growth, and interest from the advertising industry.

• "Bypassing the VC with deferred revenue", or "charging up front" as some might say. The LoveFilm presentation at Geek'n'Rolla nicely and vividly demonstrated the impact of this on cashflow.
• How I failed as a Product Owner and the lessons I learned in the process; I'd like to see more published failure tails like this one.
• Thinking about project success and how it's defined. Hitting milestones and budgets isn't enough. It's almost as though you have to get the right design, and...
• 10 contracts for your next agile project; I really want us to play with the cringe-worthily named but interesting "money for nothing, change for free" model Jeff has written about.
• They made a film of Flatland! It looks slightly cheesy, but if there was ever an unfilmable book...
• Interesting piece on Nokia encouraging girls into IT with shadowing days;
• Frédéric Filloux has some really interesting observations about developer activity and mobile technologies: "Fluidity in the transaction process is critical", and a very interesting graph showing the uptick in sales that the launch of a free "lite" version can deliver.
• Charlie looks into the Nokia phone cache;
• Comparisons (and some pithy analogies) between the various app stores: "Apple is like a big-box retailer, with one-stop shopping and very competitive prices; BlackBerry is like a high-end boutique, with a brand-name selection but higher prices; and Android’s kitschiness is like a thrift store, where you never know what you are going to find, but it will likely be a bargain."
• Caring for your introvert: "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."
• More commodity consumer kit reaches the military: "Apple's (AAPL) devices have a combination of wide uses and low cost that make it attractive handheld device to the modern soldier."

I'm technically on holiday this week, but some links anyhow:

• Jeff Patton on kanban. Really interesting, (a) because it's Jeff and (b) for the content, and I loved Karl's talk on this stuff at the Skiff a few weeks back. I profess quiet caution though; having seen how many folks misapply the relatively disciplined approaches of more formal agile techniques, I fear the line "yeah, we're kanban because we stuck some cards to the wall"...
• Wonderfully put call for a group hug from Bill Buxton to the engineering and design communities. I particularly like the specifics he goes into here: how design awareness, literacy and even thinking can, with effort, be adopted by anyone... and how design practice requires professionals "who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs". +1, +1, +1.
• SmutOnRails, Martin Fowler on the recent CouchDB presentation that caused a stir: "My observation is that most men in the software business think that there isn't much sexism left in the profession - that this curse is a memory from a previous generation. Yet when I talk to women, I hear a different story". Interesting, particularly in light of the Geek'n'rolla debate where this view of the software/digital/IT industry was confirmed (by both men and women IIRC). Lots of further reading at the foot of Martin's article.
• VCs are struggling to see the sort of returns they want in a mobile apps business. Whilst obviously on one level I find this a shockingly short-sighted yadda yadda yadda, another part of me breathes a sigh of relief. App stores are a fantastic economy, but no guarantee of riches, and we tend to hear about the few successes well over and above the mediocre mass.
• Steve Blank continues to deliver some amazingly insightful posts, and "Four steps to the epiphany" will, I suspect, be re-read a few times this year.
• For fans of contention and BlogWar, "Is Interaction Design a Dead-End Job" asks none other than Bill Moggridge. More optimistically, Tim @ Cooper suggests that "the acknowledgment and appreciation of good interaction design has allowed the practice to evolve to include a broader mandate encompassing product and service strategy throughout the customer relationship lifecycle".
• Vodafone hint that future Android devices might be less Googly and more Vodafoney. /me whistles innocently, stares into space, quietly lusts after HTC Magic.
• GMail for Mobile got the "mute" feature, which I'd never heard of but am frantically using. Oh yes - I may have forgotten to mention that I'm now using GMail in the browser for *all* my email needs... I've fallen hard for the 'plex in the last few months.
• Interesting iPhone stats from GreyStripe: average app gets 20 sessions usage of 10 minutes apiece. I wonder how this, combined with the typical development cost of an iPhone app, compares in cost-of-attention that other forms of advertising or promotion might garner. Help me, lazyweb...
• GraphJam is my new favourite best thing in the internet ever.
• T-Mobile sold 1 million G1s - not bad going for a first-generation device with every conceivable input mechanism and a spangly new OS that *isn't* being marketed by Apple. But let's not pretend that the success of Android is predicated on the sales of any 1, or even N devices, eh?
• Whilst we're on big numbers, 1 billion iPhone downloads, eh? I put this down more to Longino's Revised Statute than Buckley's Law in this case (tho Buckley definitely applies elsewhere): the sheer ease of trying stuff out on the iPhone is what's had me (and others I've had the pleasure of observing close-hand) installing apps. When all I lose by downloading a new piece of software is a little boredom, I'll do it again and again...

It feels like I've only just written on this topic, but I've heard about a couple more events I'll be speaking at over the coming months:

• I'm triple-chuffed that the workshop Joh and I proposed for the UX track of Agile2009 in Chicago has been accepted: "Many Paths To The Top Of The (Mobile) Mountain" will be an exploration of the constraints of mobile as they relate to UX in an agile environment. We're hoping to do a dry run of this session at some point in Brighton before we head off to the USA for the real deal too...
• Before then, I'll be at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona, as part of the Play strand of the event. I'm not 100% sure what I'll be talking about - perhaps looking back at case studies of successful gaming services, or our adventures with Android and casual games.
• And more pressingly, I'll be presenting at the Mobile Web 2.0 summit in London, on the two-way-ness of mobile media as a channel. A whisper in my ear reminds me the early-bird discount runs out today, so if you're not a developer or startup (who get in cheap whatever the weather), best hurry...

• All this and BOGFest too :)