RE: [council] Staff utilization report

["Andrei Kolesnikov" <andrei@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear colleagues, this is a great work, thanks Liz & staff and I don't want
to get into much details - there is no need to, just count numbers. This is
a reflection of gNSO councilors work. 

I don't agree with Stephane, Council is not struggling with prioritization.
Our problem is endless "process on how to manage process" discussions, tones
of "process definition" documents, peculiar "texting" and arguing over easy
to agree issues. Sometimes it gets worth and above mentioned used as a tool
to slow down baby projects.  Look, the real matter starts from the row #7. I
found  44 hrs in non-procedural projects from total 212 hrs in first table.
Simple logic says to look into how we stop / outsource / give away the
internal process projects.  This will give us a lot of time to focus on real
gNSO matter: whois, raa, geo, competition, abuse, transfer, jas, etc. My
proposal is to kill / hold for a few months the following
projects/process/work teams

New Constituencies Support/Process - freeze the process of review, don't
expand! Let ALAC or Board do it!

Policy Development Process Work Team - stop for 10 months, nothing will
happen 

Operations Steering Committee - kill it, don't steer

Work Prioritization - don't need if we have time

GNSO SG/C Charter Reviews/Reconfirmations - stop for 10 months

Standing Committee Drafting Team - don't start it

Policy Process Steering Committee - kill it

Working Group Work Team - kill it

GNSO Council Operations Team - kill it, hire external company to audit

Constituency & Stakeholder Operations Team - kill it

 

>From now my only vote for the internal processes will be to stop it or no
vote.  Join me, comrades! :) 

Many years ago there was a company called Digital Equipment Corporation...
DEC. We bought equipment for many millions of dollars. It didn't help DEC to
survive after the fact they were spending 80% of working hours defining a
processes. 

 

--andrei

 

From: owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Stephane Van Gelder
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 3:14 PM
To: Council GNSO
Subject: [council] Staff utilization report

 

Councillors,

 

I wanted to get this out to you asap and hopefully you will have time to
read this by the time we start our weekend discussions in SFO. To that end,
I would like to thank Liz for providing a short format for this report that
makes it easy and quick to read.

 

As you all know, we as a Council have been struggling with prioritization
for a while now. Since the start of the year, we have stepped up our
efforts. We have already deleted several projects that were either no longer
active or just plain finished. We are also now looking at a pending project
at each Council meeting (this is normally set for agenda item 2, except for
SFO because of a scheduling conflict).

 

On top of those efforts, the Leadership team has been engaging in
discussions with staff so that we can understand the resource issues that
are coming to the fore more and more often.

 

At my request, Liz has provided some key data to help us in our
understanding of the situation. This is summarized in the report below.

 

I want to thank Liz and all the policy and support staff for the outstanding
work they provide for both the GNSO and the community as a whole. I
personally feel very fortunate and privileged to be working with such
talented people, and I continue to be humbled by staff's ability to take on
such an intense workload without flinching.

 

Continuing with the personal comments, I feel that our (the ICANN community
in general I mean) inability to manage our workload is one of the greatest
dangers we face. It has been my experience, while on this Council, that
there seems to be more interest in launching new projects, whatever those
may be, than completing existing ones. And obviously, this way of doing
things is not sustainable in the long run.

 

I am therefore not surprised to see staff raising an insistent red flag
lately. But I also think it is unfair to ask the Council to tackle this by
itself. We have no control over, and no clear vision of, the way staff is
assigned to each project, be they GNSO or otherwise. As the recent consumer
choice issue shows, we also don't have control over how the Board may send
work our way. And I am sure, although I am happy to be corrected on this,
that the Board does not look at current staff utilization levels before
assigning a new project to ICANN's SOs and ACs. If they did, I don't think
the Cartagena consumer choice resolution would have been made in the way it
has.

 

So I think it is crucial that we as a community continue to look at this in
great detail to try and find a way to improve. Currently, staff are
basically telling us as a Council that we should no longer initiate new
projects. Line that up with the tentative agenda for our SFO Open Council
meeting, on which there are at least two motions that if adopted could add
to the existing workload, and you can see we clearly have a problem.

 

Thanks,

 

Stéphane

 

 

 

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