Re: project management (from Town Hall meeting)

[Henk Uijterwaal <henk at ripe.net>]

At 11:07 04/08/2005, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
> > 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
>
> We do have deadlines: charters, and external customers (implementors, 
> other SDOs).

I haven't counted the number of times were deadlines were missed this
week alone with no consequences.

For example, in a WG I attended this morning, the chair asked a person
about a document he promised to write.  The person answered that he'd do
this in the next month.  The chair replied that he said that last time as
well.  Some laughter followed, but that was the end of it.

> This is not quite true: authors are not volunteers in the normal 
> soup-kitchen-volunteer sense. In most cases, authors are paid by their 
> companies to do the work.

I agree.  But companies change priorities and with that the time people
can spend on ID's.  In this case, there is little we can do.

I can see a solution (have get commitment from employers before assigning
work to a person) but this will require a major change in the basic way we
work.


>   For example, journals routinely drop editors that don't perform their 
> (unpaid, volunteer) duties.

Yes, but I rarely see this happen in the IETF.

Henk


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