Re: project management (from Town Hall meeting)

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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.

- For large WGs, encourage use of WG secretaries to track and encourage progress. If a WG is behind, the ADs might want to ask why a WG is not using this mechanism.

- 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.)

Excessive parallelism leads to 12 5-minute presentations in IETF meetings where nobody except the authors understands the open issues and everybody else is reading email.

Also, if there 30 drafts under some form of consideration, the number of people that focus on any one draft is tiny, making real mailing-list discussions difficult.

- Have tools that remind the working group of upcoming deadlines, i.e., drafts that are supposed to be finished (ready for WGLC) within the next IETF cycle.

- Encourage authors to meet those deadlines and have mechanisms in place that encourage meeting deadlines (such as getting preferred airtime or put-back-at-end-of-queue).

- Track all WGLCs in the I-D tracker.

- Formally assign early reviewers (say, after -01) within the working group; we do this for conference papers all the time, with deadlines and automated reminders. (I maintain the EDAS tool set for this.) Right now, we sometimes ask for shows-of-hand, but there is usually limited follow-up.

- For larger groups, consider a working group "architecture" call: a period of discussion where attention is focused on one draft, with the intent of resolving any architectural and big-picture issues, but not focusing on issues of formatting or other mechanical details. The WGLC is then for making sure that the draft is ready to ship. The working group would be encouraged to read the "mid-call" draft ahead of the period and all other draft discussion would be discouraged.

- Provide an issue tracker for -01+ drafts, integrated with the I-D tracker.

- For status overviews at WG meetings, provide time-in-service for all drafts, compare with charter deadline and indicate a list of priority drafts that should receive most of the WG attention.

Henning


on both Henning's remarks and one of Brian's slides.

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