Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

[Joel M. Halpern]

While the statement Marshall makes is probably technically correct, it is 
also misleading.  As many of the effective efforts to produce quality 
determined, if you start by looking at what you can measure, you will 
almost always get the wrong answer.
Instead, you need to start by determining what matters,
and then determine how to measure it.

My largest concern with the PACT document is that it has focussed on what 
we already know how to measure (time in working groups, time in the IESG) 
instead of what we care about (which I would roughly describe as the 
composite efficacy including a sufficiently high quality result in a 
sufficiently timely fashion.)  Getting agreement on what matters is 
hard.  Figuring out how to measure that is hard.  But focusing on what we 
know how to measure is a serious mistake.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 05:20 PM 12/10/2002 -0800, Marshall Rose wrote:
>you can not manage what you do not measure. some folks prefer to measure
>intuitively, others prefer more explicit measurements. it is hard to measure
>quality (hence the intuition), but WGs that repeatedly can't keep to 
>milestones
>have a serious problem, and it doesn't take a lot of domain-specific skill to
>figure that out...