--On Friday, May 03, 2013 13:29 -0400 Thomas Narten <nar...@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Let me expand further on "work plan" and "project management". >... > But it extends to the WG as a whole. WGs have a finite number > of cycles. [...] if you spread their > resources too thinly, a WG starts having problems. > > Few WGs acknowledge that and try to manage it. Managing it > means: > > 1) identifying core documents that are priority, and minimizing > distractions that will take cycles away from the priority > deliverables. > > 2) It may mean making concious decisions not to work on some > documente *yet* in order to concentrate resources where it > matters > > 3) it means tying the work plan directly back to the charter. > If the two aren't in sync, one or both need changing. > > 4) It means recognizing that there are real limits to how many > documents a WG can (credibly) work on at any one time. (Too > many WGs have lots of marginal documents that suck cycles away > from the critical ones.) How many WGs say "no" to marginal > documents? If one replaces "WG with AD" and then "document" with "WG", one sees another part of the problem. It seems to me that we need to either: * reduce expectations of what a given AD is supposed to do with WGs and documents or * reduce the number of workload-weighted WGs that an AD is expected to "manage". If we don't do one or the other, this discussion's increased expectations for mentoring, management, and keeping track of the big picture and long-term issues are unrealistic: neither ongoing overload nor lurching from one near-crisis to the next are a good basis for getting either good management or strategic thinking done. SIRS has been mentioned as an old idea that we haven't tried. But, when one starts looking at AD load, there are other proposals around too: ones to put limits on the number of WGs and others to change the review process so that we don't expect the same people to manage WGs, advocate for them, take the lead in advocating their output, and then do the evaluations. There are reasons to believe that combination would not be ideal under the best of circumstances but, if we are going to expect more attention to WG oversight and mentoring, it gets worse. Along the same lines, it seems to me that we need to be able to trust WG Chairs to correctly understand and monitor both WG consensus and agreements reached after Last Call. If that isn't realistic, we probably need better-trained WG Chairs or replacement WG Chairs, not more work for the ADs. In particular, as another piece of the end game, I think AUTH48 ought to be able to be managed by WG Chairs and authors, with a general understanding that substantive issues have to go back to the WG and no AD involvement except in very exceptional cases. Finally, there are a few things that we used to do, that were helpful, and that were abandoned due to industry evolution and changes in priorities. The original idea of a Proposed Standard as a fairly rough specification that would be used for study and evaluation on the basis of implementation experience, not a spec from which products were built, is one that has been mentioned (although not quite in that way). The other one that occurs to me --done rarely but to good effect-- was to identify WGs who are doing design work with broad implications and give them plenary time to explain their goals, work plans, and general functional ideas. Done well and timed correctly, that allows very early and very broad review by the community independent of what is committed to writing in particular documents and alerts to issues that had best be considered and resolved earlier rather than later. Perhaps we should review our priorities for plenary time and try that again. best, john