project management (from Town Hall meeting)

I didn't want to hold up everyone's dinner,
so I joined the discussion list in order to comment
on both Henning's remarks and one of Brian's slides.

The slide said something like "we are good at designing
pieces but not at the big complex architecture issues";
and Henning talked about using project management 
techniques.

I work in several SDOs, in particular one
mentioned in another one of Brian's slides
(ITU SG13 - sorry for those liaisons for which I am responsible).
In the ITU everything is planned in 4-year working periods,
and "questions" (similar to our WGs) are opened according
to an overall plan, rather than because of participant interest.
The questions spend a great deal of time liaising with each
to ensure no duplication of effort or doing someone else's job,
and all draft editing is done on-line with participants voting
on every line.

Perhaps for this reason the ITU is really good at the architecture
issues,
and come up with good functional descriptions of complex
systems, and have invented various formal languages and tools
to faciliate analysis and design of such systems.
On the other hand the ITU seems to be less good at the actual
protocol design (compare ATM with MPLS or H.323 with SIP).

My feeling is that we need both sorts of organization.
We don't want to turn the IETF into another ITU,
but we certainly could learn from the ITU (in certain cases
it can now produce finished documents faster than the IETF),
to exploit its work where applicable, and to interact with it.

So let's keep working in an informal atmosphere,
being driven by participant interest, and leave the suits
and project management to those SDOs where it is part
of the culture.

Y(J)S