Comments on the Problem Statement draft: Document structure

Tue Oct 7 10:33:19 CEST 2003

Charlie,

You wrote:
"A statement is made that the "Unclear Mission" root cause is the "fundamental" cause.  I don't believe it. I think it's much more a case of arbitrary procedures applied selectively according to circumstance and personal preference."

IMHO, the procedures are merely tools to be used in achieving an end.  If the end is unclear, or unknown, no amount of tools will help to achieve it, whether they are well or badly used. So the mission is fundamental.

It may be true that every IETF participant ( thinks he / she ) knows what the end is.  But how many different ends would be listed if you asked everybody ?  Even if there were one agreed end today, it might well have changed in a years time, however subtly.  We can, and should, regularly review the IETF mission, to ensure that we are taking account of changing circumstances and customer requirements.

	Regards,

	Graham Travers

	International Standards Manager
	BT Exact

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-----Original Message-----
From: Charlie Perkins [mailto:charliep at iprg.nokia.com]
Sent: 07 October 2003 00:45
To: problem-statement at alvestrand.no
Subject: Comments on the Problem Statement draft: Document structure

Hello folks,

I have some comments on the draft.  I'll break it down into
three different e-mail messages, because otherwise I am
afraid that many points might be lost.

I believe that the document structure causes the
document to lose effectiveness.  It can be improved by
some pretty basic reorganization:

- The "Changes" sections should be moved into an
   appendix (or multiple appendices)

- The "Acknowledgement" section (currently 1.4) should
   be moved to be the last section before the normative
   references.

- In Section (2), the first part of the section should
   itemize the list of root causes, e.g.:
   = Unclear Mission
   = Poor Use of Effective Engineering Practice
   = Standards Process Abuse
   = Workload exceeds available staffing levels
   = Unsuitable Management Structure
   = Poor WG dynamics
   = Inadequate Staff Preparation

This text should be placed before section 2.1.

I know that the IETF participants are "Staff", because
I have two IETF t-shirts that say so.  Also I would
strongly encourage _short_ formulations for the "root
causes", because long rambling formulations just don't
get the point across anywhere near as well.

A statement is made that the "Unclear Mission" root
cause is the "fundamental" cause.  I don't believe it.
I think it's much more a case of arbitrary procedures
applied selectively according to circumstance and
personal preference.  When I discuss with people at
the IETF, I may often hear a point of view that I don't
agree with.  But I rarely would characterize it as not
having a clue about mission.  Without formulating a
proposed "mission statement" to try to prove my
point, I would at least like to strongly suggest that the
characterization in section 2., preceding section 2.1,
is wrong.  If I had to pick out a more fundamental
root cause, it would be "Unsuitable Management
Structure", at least from the current formulation for
the set of root causes.

Thus, I would suggest demoting section 2.2 to be placed
_much_ later in section 2.