My team spends roughly 20% of our time on what we call "20% work." 20% work is whatever work we think is most useful to our personal development or to the company. The rest of our time is spent on work that our management chain tells us to do.
Should we add this 20% work to our sprints? I like that it gives us a chance to discuss the work during sprint planning and make sure it's broken up into manageable chunks. Also, it helps us ensure that 20% work doesn't fall by the wayside as we do our 80% work.
On the other hand, putting 20% work in a sprint makes it harder to communicate our team's throughput for 80% work to our management chain.
Do any of you do 20% work? Do you ticket it?
