Front-end delays

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There has been a fair amount of effort in accelerating the tail end of the document process, i.e., after IETF last call. It is unclear whether this has succeeded (as there don't seem to be any published measurements), but I believe that the main problem with timeliness is now in the WG process itself. Each case is unique, but there are a disturbing number of modest-size documents that have taken 3 to 5 years from first individual draft to RFC. In a separate message, I'll have more process- and people-oriented suggestions, but here are some simple things that would at least allow us to measure, and thus manage, delays:

(1) Problem: Currently, the mapping between charter items and drafts is often vague and those not intimately involved with the process are often left to guess which draft(s) meant to address which charter item.

Proposal: Once the I-Ds have been created, the charter is updated to reflect I-D names. This doesn't have to be done for every single draft, but doing such an update once for each IETF meeting seems easy, as there are no substantive changes.

(2) The I-D tracker should keep track of the charter deadline for each document so that the author and WG chairs can trivially see whether a document is on track or not. [This item can obviously be used to automatically generate (1).]

(3) At each WG meeting, it should be expected that after the agenda bashing, the delivery schedule for each draft is reviewed, maybe with a red (already out of schedule), yellow (likely to miss schedule) and green (possible/likely to meet schedule) indication.

(4) Just like the RFC editor and IANA provides statistics, each area should provide an overview of its status at the IESG plenary, indicating the major work items of each WG and whether the WG is generally on schedule or behind. Again, one could imagine a color coding, e.g., if 30% or more of the charter items are "in the red", the WG is flagged red.

Clearly, WG chairs and ADs could "game" the system to make the WG look on time, by continuously adjusting schedules or by having deadlines a decade out. That itself, however, would provide an indication that a WG is not meeting deadlines or is planning to be really slow. If one wanted to, one could indicate both original and current deadline for work items.

None of these items make things faster, but they would allow the IETF management to apply project management tools, such as reducing scope, replacing authors, or working group chairs, with some efficiency. More on hypotheses for why things are late in another note.

Henning



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