Subject: Re: Response requested: Proposal regarding milestones

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 12:07:09 -0800 (PST)

Fred,
	I note you really have three modest proposals: changing the
way milestones are tracked and managed by wg chairs and ADs; changing
the way scheduling of IETF meeting time works; and changing the way
ADs communicate with a working group over drafts which require updates
after they have been submitted to the IESG.  I'd suggest that there is
no strong need to tie these changes to each other, and that they
should each be considered alone.
	On point one, I agree with you and most other posters that
more tracking of the date slips would be valuable as a tool in keeping
things on schedule.  I like in particular that your proposal is not
tied to a mechanistic "shut down after N months past the milestones",
but that it does imply continued review.  As Thomas Narten has pointed
out, writing a spec. sometimes changes your view of the engineering
problem you set out to solve, and I worry that the mechanistic 
answers miss this part of the process.  Involving those outside
the working group (ads, a directorate, or related groups) when
that changed understanding is going to change the deliverable or
its due date does seem broadly useful.
	I'm less clear on the reasons behind point two.  Are you
trying to avoid working groups with all deliverables "done" from
meeting without AD approval, or trying to avoid working groups which
have not updated the dates on incomplete deliverables from meeting
without AD approval?  As a side note, would it be valuable simple to
point these conditions out to the AD, while retaining the AD's current
system of approving all of the request?  (That is, I'm not so clear on
the value of making the approval automatic of working group meetings
for those with future deliverables; is the current process onerous in
time or energy consumed?)
	On your last point:

> whenever an AD makes a statement to a
> working group representative, such as "I have reviewed draft <mumble> and
> it needs <this> done to it before I can advance it with a clear
> conscience", the working group needs 	to be copied on the email. It might be
> nice if it was also posted somewhere for ease of finding it ("what is the
> status of <draft>? Oh, the AD sent it back for stated updates..."),

	what counts as a working group representative?  The chair, a
document author, an active participant?  Does this treatment of the
statement occur only when a document has been officially forwarded, or
does it also occur when an AD speaks "hat on" during the normal course
of a working group's deliberation?  Having been in a situation where a
document of mine got held up because the chairs did not forward
comments on needed revisions, I see the point.  I note, though, that
making this policy rather than common practice will almost certainly
give rise to a different class of informal communication.  When Action
Technologies built a language-action based messaging system, one of
the first things they discovered was that folks were very reluctant to
use categories like "request" and "command"; they used "comment"
instead and relied on the recipient to figure it out.  We can ensure
that formal decisions get formal responses and are minuted
appropriately, but we almost certainly can't eliminate the informal
interactions.
			regards,
					Ted Hardie

> 
> At 01:03 AM 12/12/2002 +0100, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
> >AS far as I can tell, all the time I have been an AD, the
> >milestones have never been used to kill/close a WG if they
> >missed their milestones even by years. So I think out culture
> >is not used to it. If we all want it, we can change that,
> 
> In point of fact, MTR did so regularly during his tenure as NM AD. It got
> people pretty upset at times, but it was in fact effective. A lot of work
> got done on something resembling a schedule. Ditto the editing of RFC 1812;
> I was given a certain time period, and there was a clear expectation that
> it would get done in that timeframe. My day-job management basically told
> me to take whatever time I needed and do so.
> 
> This has been done in the past, and can be done now.
> 
> So I have a modest proposal.
> 
> (a) I would like to see charters changed slightly, to show the initial date
> for a milestone and the current expected date, and showing "done" as a
> separate checkoff with an "actual" date instead of an "expected" date.
> 
> (b) I'm willing to work through whatever process to update them. Initially
> that sounds like email to ietf-action sent either by the WG Chair or the
> AD. But it does sound like an AD or WG Chair should be able to update the
> charter more-or-less directly - for example, the WG Chair could have access
> to a form that lets him update the milestone dates, and gets mailed to the
> AD. When the AD forwards it to <the right place>, the new information is
> substituted for the current expected date.
> 
> (c) The secretariat should be given summary permission to give a working
> group with future charter milestones a meeting or two at an IETF, with or
> without AD notification. A working group without future milestones (eg,
> milestones with future expected dates) should be granted such only with AD
> concurrence.
> 
> (d) the secretariat should ping the working group chair, copying the
> relevant AD, as milestone dates are crossed: "on today's date, the
> <example> working group is supposed to submit the <whatever> draft. Have
> you done that? Please update your charter, either checking it off as 'done'
> or showing a new 'expected date'." Of course, milestones that are done and
> checked off need not be pinged about.
> 
> You have heard this from me before. I think doing this (management by
> objectives) will very likely reduce the level of concern in the IETF, as is
> being discussed on the "problem statement" list.
> 
> The other obvious change is that whenever an AD makes a statement to a
> working group representative, such as "I have reviewed draft <mumble> and
> it needs <this> done to it before I can advance it with a clear
> conscience", the working group needs to be copied on the email. It might be
> nice if it was also posted somewhere for ease of finding it ("what is the
> status of <draft>? Oh, the AD sent it back for stated updates..."), but
> that is a secondary issue if working group mailing lists have archives.
> 
> Response requested: Working group chairs that feel that this would be a
> wise change to our procedures, please say so. People that would like to
> *not* do this, please say so, say why it's a bad idea, and say what you
> think would be a better solution.
>

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 13:34:19 -0800

At 12:07 PM 12/12/2002 -0800, Ted Hardie wrote:
>On point one, I agree with you and most other posters that more tracking
>of the date slips would be valuable as a tool in keeping things on schedule.

Thanks.

>Are you trying to avoid working groups with all deliverables "done" from
>meeting without AD approval, or trying to avoid working groups which have
>not updated the dates on incomplete deliverables from meeting without AD
>approval?

Well, let's do a quick survey. There are, if I count correctly, 140 working
groups. I'm not going to go through all of them: I'll do the Apps area, as
it comes up first on the IETF "working groups" web page.

The first working group is ACAP. It's incomplete milestones are:

         DEC 00  Submit Final drafts of options, personal addressbook and
mediatype
                 dataset classes
         FEB 01  Proposed standard recycle of ACAP base spec with bugfixes and
                 possible change to mandatory-to-implement auth mechanism
         MAY 01  Conclude WG.

The second is APEX:

         MAR 01  Prepare initial draft of CPIM-compliant APEX Text
Messaging and
                 Presence specifications
         MAY 01  Submit revised Text Messaging and Presence specifications
to the
                 IESG for consideration as a standards-track publication
         MAY 01  Submit revised APEX specifications to the IESG for
consideration
                 as a standards-track publication

The first one that I come across that has a *future* deliverable is one
near and dear to you: CRISP. Your milestones are:

         OCT 02  Submit requirements document as an Informational RFC
         NOV 02  Submit first draft of protocol (use) specification
         NOV 02  Submit first draft of domain registration administrative
directory
                 services required schema element specification.
         APR 03  Submit revised protocol (use) specification document as
Proposed
                 Standard
         APR 03  Submit revised draft of domain registration administrative
                 directory services required schema element specification
as Proposed
                 Standard.

Three of those have past dates; it seems like a fair question might be:
"have you done so? If not, when will you?" Not that I'm looking for answers
in this forum, of course - that is an interaction you should be having with
your AD. I'm proposing an automated way to ensure that the discussion is
initiated.

By contrast, EDIINT has all of its milestones marked as "completed", and
USEFOR has no milestones whatsoever. FTPEXT, btw, has several incomplete
milestones, all dated 1997. TN3270E's milestones are dated 1998.

In total, in the Apps area, I find:
         one working group with no deliverables at all,
         five working groups that have completed all of their deliverables,
         sixteen working groups that have symptoms of being in trouble,
         five working groups that appear to be on schedule.

Now, as a triage procedure (and here I'm not trying to criticize the ADs or
anyone else, I am merely looking at this, twirling my hair into two pointy
piles, and behaving like a manager), I would divide this broadly into:

  - six working groups that I can immediately close and leave the mailing list
    open; they can re-open when they have something to do.
  - five working groups whose chairs and authors deserve a nice surprise under
    their tree.
  - sixteen working groups that I need to have a close discussion with.

If I were the AD, I would be looking at the sixteen, and asking myself
whether I needed a new chair, a new charter, or to close the working group;
I would not let four months pass without doing *something* to change the
situation. If I worked at a company, had a title as "second level manager"
or "department manager", and had this amount of this kind of stuff in my
department, I would get handed my head.

So, now back to your question. You want to know what I'm trying to achieve.
I'm trying to force that conversation to happen, using the opportunity to
get a room at an IETF meeting as a lever. This is also the objective of the
proposals to limit the number of working groups in the IETF or to limit
their duration. The argument for my approach is that it is based on an
agreement between the WG and the AD, not something arbitrary. To me, an
arbitrary boundary seems unreasonable, while a contract is a very
reasonable management and enforcement tool.

>As a side note, would it be valuable simple to point these conditions out
>to the AD, while retaining the AD's current system of approving all of the
>request?

If the AD is willing to do the indicated action, yes. We could discuss one
AD who had a working group in his area chartered with milestones dated
1994, and who refused to address the situation. He is no longer an AD, and
his successor has rechartered the working group with current milestones.

In the cases of the current Apps ADs (the situation above) I happen to know
that they had a much worse situation not very long ago and have been
actively working to clean it up. I obviously think they still have work to
do, but I applaud what they have done. I'm trying to give them consistent
tools with the other ADs, and consistent expectations with their WG chairs.

>         what counts as a working group representative? etc etc

I'm sure we can make this as complicated as imaginable if we try hard
enough. Sometimes it is appropriate to have private informal discussions,
and I don't want to outlaw that or make it difficult. But when a document
is handed to an AD for review or some other agreed deliverable event
occurs, although we treat that as a private event between the authors,
chairs, and the AD, it is in fact a formal communication from the working
group to the IESG in the person of the AD. When the AD responds saying "you
need to do something before I will let this progress", that is also a
formal statement from the IESG in the person of the AD to the working group.

I'm simply saying that the working group should be copied on that interchange.

>Having been in a situation where a document of mine got held up because
>the chairs did not forward comments on needed revisions, I see the point.

I don't know that it is always the chair. I know of cases where the AD has
failed to write up a reply in a timely fashion (have been known to track
the AD down to get the comments verbally), and cases where the email
arrived at the author but was somehow lost or ignored. The point is the
same, though, as you know: the working group needs to know which it is, and
if there are specific issues that the working group is being asked to
address, they need to be known to the working group.

As to AD comments "hat on", I can argue myself a couple of directions. As a
document author/editor, I often get private emails from folks saying "I
found the following 18 spelling errors and other nits" or "would that <x>
were true about your document". I send nits privately and appreciate
receiving them privately. Substantive comments on drafts in progress, I
think, are statements to the working group, not the author, regardless of
who sends them. IMHO, they should get sent to the list so that they can be
discussed and edited into the document as consensus develops.
Meta-comments, I would argue, always belong on the list.