Re: project management (from Town Hall meeting)

[Henk Uijterwaal <henk at ripe.net>]

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.

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.

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.

Henk


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Henk Uijterwaal                           Email: henk.uijterwaal(at)ripe.net
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