Re: project management (from Town Hall meeting)

[Aki Niemi <aki.niemi at nokia.com>]

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