Subject: RE: Planning (Re: "setting up the administrative structures we need")

From: "David Lloyd-Jones" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:28:07 -0400

>From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
>--On 9. juni 2004 10:00 -0400 David Lloyd-Jones <[email-masked]> 
>wrote:
>
>>On this planet things are almost always set up without plans, and plansare 
>>almost always constructed ex post facto to justify whatever happened.
>
>not my experience.

Harald,

A single example would make this observation more credible. There certainly 
are areas of life in which the making of plans routinly precedes an action 
-- but they are almost always things of the most utterly routine kind. 
Building corporations make plans of the houses they are about to build, but 
they rarely make plans for the development of their businesses. Ordinary 
people sometimes write shopping lists before going to the supermarket, but 
this is rare, and other aspects of ordinary life is which people make the 
"detailed plans" that an earlier correspondent referred to are far rarer 
still.

>my favourite quote on planning is "the purpose of planning is so that you 
>can panic in time" - closely followed by "no plan survives first contact 
>with the enemy".

These two quotes are rather in the same spirit as my earlier post.

The point I wanted to make, without saying it too baldly, was that the 
messages about planning, on all sides, seemed to be posted in order exactly 
to avoid the issue people felt strongly about -- the question of whether 
there is any good reason to put the hiring of paid staff at the top of the 
common agenda.

There, I've said it baldly.

Since we agree that cute quotes have a valuable role in life, I am sorry 
that I cannot find the canonical form of that Law which states that an 
organization which puts its own organization high on the agenda is well 
along in tottering its last steps.

                                             Best,

                                                  -dlj.

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN Premium   
http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-ca&page=byoa/prem&xAPID=1994&DI=1034&SU=http://hotmail.com/enca&HL=Market_MSNIS_Taglines

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:29:20 -0700

--On 15. juni 2004 09:28 -0400 David Lloyd-Jones <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

>>> On this planet things are almost always set up without plans, and
>>> plansare  almost always constructed ex post facto to justify whatever
>>> happened.
>>
>> not my experience.
>
> Harald,
>
> A single example would make this observation more credible. There
> certainly are areas of life in which the making of plans routinly
> precedes an action -- but they are almost always things of the most
> utterly routine kind.

a trivial example - I don't know if you'll take this as supporting my 
theory or yours:

all IETF WGs start out with milestones saying when they expect to reach 
their goals - which are supposed to be rooted in some idea of a plan for 
how to get there.

the useful thing about milestones (if there is any useful thing) is that 
when we (far too often) fail to meet them, it's obvious that we aren't on 
the first plan any more, and we can re-schedule - which exposes to the rest 
of the world the fact that we won't deliver what we promised in time, which 
in turn may lead to THEM adjusting their expected schedules (or, more 
likely, gripe about the unreliable IETF that can't deliver specs in a 
timely manner).

Panic in time.

                       Harald