Hi,
ext Henk Uijterwaal wrote:
At 10:05 04/08/2005, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
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.
I doubt that this is going to solve anything. All basic project management
techniques assume that a project has a deadline and that the people working
on it have some incentive to get the work done. This is not the case for
ID's: we continue working on them until there is rough consensus, no matter
how long it takes. The authors are volunteers, if other activities pop up
and work on the ID has to be postponed, there is nothing the WG chair can
do.
I hope you're not saying I-Ds have no deadlines. Sorry, but they do.
Sure we're a voluntary organization, and technical quality is the first
order of priority. But that does *not* mean that it is OK to work on a
particular draft only six weeks per year (around the f2f meetings), or
that it's OK to have an author disappear for six months, or that each
and every crazy idea sent to the mailing list needs to be incorporated
in late stages of the work, resulting in constant feature creep.
Voluntary does not prohibit an incentives system, nor does it disallow
project managers (the WG chairs) equipped with carrots and sticks.
The real question is: how can we set realistic deadlines and get commitment
from people to get the work done by the deadline, even if they are
interrupted.
By using the tools and conventions for WGs that Henning was proposing.
Only when we have answered this question, it makes sense to start looking
at tools to support this process.
- 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.)
This is another result of doing work with volunteers. If somebody is
interested in a topic but not in another, then there is nothing that
can stop him from working on the first topic, even if it might be
beneficial for overall progress to finish the topic first.
I think there is a misconception here about what "volunteer" means. I've
worked in other voluntary organizations, and let me tell you, if you're
a junior basketball coach but don't show up for practice, or decide to
coach tennis unannounced for the next few months, you get replaced
pretty quickly.
Cheers,
Aki
Henk
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Henk Uijterwaal Email:
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