The only way to make sure deliveries of product -- in this case, IETF
documents -- are timely is to decide when they are needed by and set firm
deadlines. The IETF currently does not do that. Instead, we leave
everything
open-ended.
Deadlines are useless unless they are well-informed. If you haven't ever done
something before, you don't know how long it will take. The timeframes we
put in our charters are guesses at best - maybe informed by intuition but
little else. At worst they are wishful thinking.
Another part of the reason our deadlines are unrealistic is that the milestones
we set are usually meaningless. Faced with the large task of developing
a protocol to do X, we fail to break that task down into meaningful subtasks.
A milestone like "produce draft 00 of document Y" is a measurable goal but
not a meaningful goal, because as stated it is irrelevant to the larger task.
At base, there seems to be quite a bit of confusion about the different
between delivering useful engineering specifications for use on the Internet,
versus doing networking research.
"Research" is a broad word. Some forms of research are appropriate
subtasks of an engineering effort and reasonable to do within IETF.
Others are not. For instance, every WG needs to do some research
to understand its problem space and likely impacts of its work.
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