I would never suggest adopting a 4-year project schedule, but would
suggest a number of simple project management techniques and goals:
- As part of WG chair training, train WG chairs in basic project
management techniques and indicate that driving progress is an important
role.
- For large WGs, encourage use of WG secretaries to track and encourage
progress. If a WG is behind, the ADs might want to ask why a WG is not
using this mechanism.
- Avoid massive number of parallel efforts in working groups. Instead,
focus on a small number of drafts and get them out in less than a year
from draft-ietf-*-00. (They might start as draft-personal- if they are
exploratory.)
Excessive parallelism leads to 12 5-minute presentations in IETF
meetings where nobody except the authors understands the open issues and
everybody else is reading email.
Also, if there 30 drafts under some form of consideration, the number of
people that focus on any one draft is tiny, making real mailing-list
discussions difficult.
- Have tools that remind the working group of upcoming deadlines, i.e.,
drafts that are supposed to be finished (ready for WGLC) within the next
IETF cycle.
- Encourage authors to meet those deadlines and have mechanisms in place
that encourage meeting deadlines (such as getting preferred airtime or
put-back-at-end-of-queue).
- Track all WGLCs in the I-D tracker.
- Formally assign early reviewers (say, after -01) within the working
group; we do this for conference papers all the time, with deadlines and
automated reminders. (I maintain the EDAS tool set for this.) Right now,
we sometimes ask for shows-of-hand, but there is usually limited follow-up.
- For larger groups, consider a working group "architecture" call: a
period of discussion where attention is focused on one draft, with the
intent of resolving any architectural and big-picture issues, but not
focusing on issues of formatting or other mechanical details. The WGLC
is then for making sure that the draft is ready to ship. The working
group would be encouraged to read the "mid-call" draft ahead of the
period and all other draft discussion would be discouraged.
- Provide an issue tracker for -01+ drafts, integrated with the I-D tracker.
- For status overviews at WG meetings, provide time-in-service for all
drafts, compare with charter deadline and indicate a list of priority
drafts that should receive most of the WG attention.
Henning
on both Henning's remarks and one of Brian's slides.
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