Ignite

A FedEx day is a concept from Atlassian Software, where it was inspired by Google's 20 percent concept. The original Google idea is that developers can work on their own projects for 20 percent of their time. Atlassian's variation is that developers can work on own projects for a full day a week (20 percent too, but assigned to a specific day), and that developers must deliver a usable result at the end of that day; hence the FedEx analogy.

One of the differences between the original Google concept and Atlassian adoptation is that bigger projects can run within the Google concept since project do not have to be concluded within any limits - they can be carried over from week to week. At Atira we had already adopted Google's 20 percent concept, but thought Atlassian's idea was refreshing and particularly interesting within standard product development, which is a big part of our portfolio. For that reason, we adopted the Atlassian concept too, but limited the number of days to four a year. In practise, we made FedEx days a variation within the regular 20 percent time concept, combining what we think is the core value of them both: Simultaneously strenghtening the company's innovation and creating personal value for employees by enabling developers to test or realise own ideas outside the "dogma" of business plans.