Staff utilization report
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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 We have already deleted several projects that were either no longer active or just plain finished.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 Début du message réexpédié :
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I would also like to add some of my own personal comments to Stephane's on some of the issues I see with this Utilization studies and the conclusions drawn from it. 1. First, the utilization rate is drawn from a 40-hour work week which I understand is "ideal", but I would venture to say that none of us only work 40 hours a week. I wish this were the case, but unfortunately it is not especially when "admin" time is figured into the equation. With "admin time" in the equation, most of us work at least 45+ hours per week. If you were to figure in 45 hours per week per FTW (as opposed to 40), then the utilization rate drops from 126% to 112% (348/310.5 X 100)(assuming 6.9 FTEs). 2. ICANN policy staff is recommending that the Council not assign any further work as a result of them being over capacity. GNSO Council leadership has tried over and over again to figure out why this is the case and this report points out that some of the reasons staff is overworked have little if anything to do with the activities of the Council. Yet the requests to reduce staff workload to my knowledge is ONLY going to the Council. I have asked ICANN policy staff if this study and their requests to reduce work load has been sent to ICANN Executive Management and the ICANN Board, but have not gotten a response. As a council, we have zero insight or control into the work that is assigned to ICANN Policy staff by the Board or by ICANN executive management, or for that matter any request that comes in from a constituency or stakeholder group for support. From my estimates of the time as indicated in the snapshot, 50 hours of its work comes from the Board and/or Executive team while another 26 hours came from the request of new groups wanting to be constituencies. Combines that is nearly 2 full time employees (of the 6.9 that have been allocated to the GNSO). The GNSO Council has absolutely no insight nor control over this work by ICANN Policy staff. 3. I want us to engage in a constructive dialogue on this as I believe it is critical. I had hoped not to have to drill down on individual hours and numbers in this utilization study, but because ICANN policy staff is making the recommendation that we take up no new projects as a Council, I think we need to start getting into the weeds a little, so here it goes. This is not meant to question the hours spent to date on the work, but rather an eye towards looking to the future. a) This study states that new Constituencies Support/Process is 26 hours per week. I really do not believe that this will be (or even should be) the amount of this will require on an ongoing basis. That is more than ½ of a full person in man hours and that seems really high. Even if it were 10 hours, that would seem high, but lets assume for arguments sake that this could be reduced to 10 hours per week. b) The OSC seems to be winding down its activities, correct, which is another 14 hours. c) Unless a motion is approved at this Council meeting, the Whois studies would not be ongoing work, that would be another 10 hours. d) Registration Abused Policy WG is now closed and has morphed into Best Practices and UDRP, which is another 6 hours per week. e) I believe the GCOT work is completed or almost complete. Another 2 hours. f) PPSC is down in the study at 6 hours a week, but I do not see more PPSC work in the next several months making way for the Standing Committee (which has a separate time allocation). g) With all luck, this work prioritization I think can be eliminated and become a burden for the Council and its leadership - another 14 hours. Just looking at this quick math, making these changes would save us 68 hours of ICANN policy staff time. Even if we went to the 100% level at 40 hours per week (But see #1 above), that would still leave us with 18 hours to play with, which is where I would put the new WHOIS studies which look like one or more may move forward and some other items the Council wants to achieve. 4. So, if we commit to making even these small changes, what reductions can we expect from the Board and ICANN's Executive Team as that takes up nearly 2 persons' time? If even we can reduce that to 1.5 persons' time, that would give us another 20 hours to play with. 5. Conclusion: I do not believe it is fair to recommend that new projects be taken on. I believe there is still room to play with AND I would like to see the ICANN Executives and the Board make the same commitments we are making in helping to achieve realistic workloads. This is a problem, but not just a problem for the Council. This is a problem that needs to be handled with ICANN Executive Management and the Board. As such, I would like to explore with the Council the formation of an exploratory committee comprised of GNSO Council members, ICANN Executive Management and ICANN Board members to look into this issue and figure out the best path forward. The answer cannot be on a going forward basis that no more work can be done. This is all my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of my company, my stakeholder group or others in Council leadership. Jeffrey J. Neuman Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Law & Policy ________________________________ The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient you have received this e-mail message in error and any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and delete the original message. From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Stéphane Van Gelder Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:14 AM 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/7a22454c58da67ad9aed82696702205f.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
All, Just a few clarifications in response to Jeff's email: 1. I have not been asked whether the executive team is aware of the workload problem among GNSO policy staff. But, since I've now been asked, yes, they are aware. 2. Nowhere does staff recommend that the GNSO not take on any further work. We simply say that staff cannot take on new work and continue with all of the existing work, managed/handled in the same way. This is NOT the same thing. I suggest that if the Council, for whatever reason, chooses not to delay or postpone some portion of current work, then there simply is no resource bandwidth to start new work. So we are not making a recommendation, we are suggesting options under the circumstances just in case the Council concludes that certain new projects are more pressing than certain existing projects. If the Council wants to initiate new work without staff support, that is also an option of course. 3. Jeff's points with regard to "freeing up hours" assumes that the hours indicated in our report are average hours that are constant. The hours/project report are not average hours for each project, they are actual hours for the week we studied. Jeff's analysis assumes too much regarding the utility of the data in the report. The report is useful to show that staff worked 348 hours that week and what we did during those hours. It helped me validate that staff workload overall is still excessive. In some cases the hours spent might be a useful guide of future work, in many cases it will not. That is why I suggest Step 5 - where staff helps the GNSO Council estimate the resources that might be freed up if we handle projects differently. We are happy to respond to questions, including detailed questions like those that Jeff raises about specific projects. On Whois, even if the Council rejects further studies, I am still implementing one study which will take some smaller number of hours to support. The OSC may be on hiatus, but its work is not done. The new constituencies work is pursuant to the Board mandate, I definitely think the amount of hours could be reduced over time, but there were Board deadlines to be met that staff was working on during the week of the study. I am spending many hours personally on prioritization with the preparation of this report and this dialogue, and also the time I spent studying those new tasks, and how I think they might best be supported, so I do not think "prioritization" time will be eliminated. I must also respectfully express grave concern about Jeff's proposal to consider 45 hours/week as the baseline work hours for staff. We all strive to excel in our work and will likely work more hours. Frankly that is a given, and is proven out by the crazy hours we've been working for years now. The GNSO Council cannot dictate staff work hours, these are negotiated with our employer and subject to applicable employment laws. Lastly, staff should be represented on any committee that is formed on this issue. Best, Liz From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Neuman, Jeff Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 5:55 AM To: Stéphane Van Gelder; Council GNSO Subject: RE: [council] Staff utilization report I would also like to add some of my own personal comments to Stephane's on some of the issues I see with this Utilization studies and the conclusions drawn from it. 1. First, the utilization rate is drawn from a 40-hour work week which I understand is "ideal", but I would venture to say that none of us only work 40 hours a week. I wish this were the case, but unfortunately it is not especially when "admin" time is figured into the equation. With "admin time" in the equation, most of us work at least 45+ hours per week. If you were to figure in 45 hours per week per FTW (as opposed to 40), then the utilization rate drops from 126% to 112% (348/310.5 X 100)(assuming 6.9 FTEs). 2. ICANN policy staff is recommending that the Council not assign any further work as a result of them being over capacity. GNSO Council leadership has tried over and over again to figure out why this is the case and this report points out that some of the reasons staff is overworked have little if anything to do with the activities of the Council. Yet the requests to reduce staff workload to my knowledge is ONLY going to the Council. I have asked ICANN policy staff if this study and their requests to reduce work load has been sent to ICANN Executive Management and the ICANN Board, but have not gotten a response. As a council, we have zero insight or control into the work that is assigned to ICANN Policy staff by the Board or by ICANN executive management, or for that matter any request that comes in from a constituency or stakeholder group for support. From my estimates of the time as indicated in the snapshot, 50 hours of its work comes from the Board and/or Executive team while another 26 hours came from the request of new groups wanting to be constituencies. Combines that is nearly 2 full time employees (of the 6.9 that have been allocated to the GNSO). The GNSO Council has absolutely no insight nor control over this work by ICANN Policy staff. 3. I want us to engage in a constructive dialogue on this as I believe it is critical. I had hoped not to have to drill down on individual hours and numbers in this utilization study, but because ICANN policy staff is making the recommendation that we take up no new projects as a Council, I think we need to start getting into the weeds a little, so here it goes. This is not meant to question the hours spent to date on the work, but rather an eye towards looking to the future. a) This study states that new Constituencies Support/Process is 26 hours per week. I really do not believe that this will be (or even should be) the amount of this will require on an ongoing basis. That is more than ½ of a full person in man hours and that seems really high. Even if it were 10 hours, that would seem high, but lets assume for arguments sake that this could be reduced to 10 hours per week. b) The OSC seems to be winding down its activities, correct, which is another 14 hours. c) Unless a motion is approved at this Council meeting, the Whois studies would not be ongoing work, that would be another 10 hours. d) Registration Abused Policy WG is now closed and has morphed into Best Practices and UDRP, which is another 6 hours per week. e) I believe the GCOT work is completed or almost complete. Another 2 hours. f) PPSC is down in the study at 6 hours a week, but I do not see more PPSC work in the next several months making way for the Standing Committee (which has a separate time allocation). g) With all luck, this work prioritization I think can be eliminated and become a burden for the Council and its leadership - another 14 hours. Just looking at this quick math, making these changes would save us 68 hours of ICANN policy staff time. Even if we went to the 100% level at 40 hours per week (But see #1 above), that would still leave us with 18 hours to play with, which is where I would put the new WHOIS studies which look like one or more may move forward and some other items the Council wants to achieve. 4. So, if we commit to making even these small changes, what reductions can we expect from the Board and ICANN's Executive Team as that takes up nearly 2 persons' time? If even we can reduce that to 1.5 persons' time, that would give us another 20 hours to play with. 5. Conclusion: I do not believe it is fair to recommend that new projects be taken on. I believe there is still room to play with AND I would like to see the ICANN Executives and the Board make the same commitments we are making in helping to achieve realistic workloads. This is a problem, but not just a problem for the Council. This is a problem that needs to be handled with ICANN Executive Management and the Board. As such, I would like to explore with the Council the formation of an exploratory committee comprised of GNSO Council members, ICANN Executive Management and ICANN Board members to look into this issue and figure out the best path forward. The answer cannot be on a going forward basis that no more work can be done. This is all my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of my company, my stakeholder group or others in Council leadership. Jeffrey J. Neuman Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Law & Policy ________________________________ The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient you have received this e-mail message in error and any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and delete the original message. From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Stéphane Van Gelder Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:14 AM 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c1559349389ceef7225a30d0f7c6ae18.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Liz, Thank you for your response and I look forward to discussing this over the weekend. Can you also address the points raised in my number 2 over the weekend? I will repost the relevant part below: "ICANN policy staff is recommending that the Council not assign any further work as a result of them being over capacity. GNSO Council leadership has tried over and over again to figure out why this is the case and this report points out that some of the reasons staff is overworked have little if anything to do with the activities of the Council. Yet the requests to reduce staff workload to my knowledge is ONLY going to the Council. I have asked ICANN policy staff if this study and their requests to reduce work load has been sent to ICANN Executive Management and the ICANN Board, but have not gotten a response. As a council, we have zero insight or control into the work that is assigned to ICANN Policy staff by the Board or by ICANN executive management, or for that matter any request that comes in from a constituency or stakeholder group for support. From my estimates of the time as indicated in the snapshot, 50 hours of its work comes from the Board and/or Executive team while another 26 hours came from the request of new groups wanting to be constituencies. Combines that is nearly 2 full time employees (of the 6.9 that have been allocated to the GNSO). The GNSO Council has absolutely no insight nor control over this work by ICANN Policy staff." Jeffrey J. Neuman Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Law & Policy ________________________________ The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient you have received this e-mail message in error and any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and delete the original message. From: Liz Gasster [mailto:liz.gasster@icann.org] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 11:56 AM To: Neuman, Jeff; Stéphane Van Gelder; Council GNSO Subject: RE: [council] Staff utilization report All, Just a few clarifications in response to Jeff's email: 1. I have not been asked whether the executive team is aware of the workload problem among GNSO policy staff. But, since I've now been asked, yes, they are aware. 2. Nowhere does staff recommend that the GNSO not take on any further work. We simply say that staff cannot take on new work and continue with all of the existing work, managed/handled in the same way. This is NOT the same thing. I suggest that if the Council, for whatever reason, chooses not to delay or postpone some portion of current work, then there simply is no resource bandwidth to start new work. So we are not making a recommendation, we are suggesting options under the circumstances just in case the Council concludes that certain new projects are more pressing than certain existing projects. If the Council wants to initiate new work without staff support, that is also an option of course. 3. Jeff's points with regard to "freeing up hours" assumes that the hours indicated in our report are average hours that are constant. The hours/project report are not average hours for each project, they are actual hours for the week we studied. Jeff's analysis assumes too much regarding the utility of the data in the report. The report is useful to show that staff worked 348 hours that week and what we did during those hours. It helped me validate that staff workload overall is still excessive. In some cases the hours spent might be a useful guide of future work, in many cases it will not. That is why I suggest Step 5 - where staff helps the GNSO Council estimate the resources that might be freed up if we handle projects differently. We are happy to respond to questions, including detailed questions like those that Jeff raises about specific projects. On Whois, even if the Council rejects further studies, I am still implementing one study which will take some smaller number of hours to support. The OSC may be on hiatus, but its work is not done. The new constituencies work is pursuant to the Board mandate, I definitely think the amount of hours could be reduced over time, but there were Board deadlines to be met that staff was working on during the week of the study. I am spending many hours personally on prioritization with the preparation of this report and this dialogue, and also the time I spent studying those new tasks, and how I think they might best be supported, so I do not think "prioritization" time will be eliminated. I must also respectfully express grave concern about Jeff's proposal to consider 45 hours/week as the baseline work hours for staff. We all strive to excel in our work and will likely work more hours. Frankly that is a given, and is proven out by the crazy hours we've been working for years now. The GNSO Council cannot dictate staff work hours, these are negotiated with our employer and subject to applicable employment laws. Lastly, staff should be represented on any committee that is formed on this issue. Best, Liz From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Neuman, Jeff Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 5:55 AM To: Stéphane Van Gelder; Council GNSO Subject: RE: [council] Staff utilization report I would also like to add some of my own personal comments to Stephane's on some of the issues I see with this Utilization studies and the conclusions drawn from it. 1. First, the utilization rate is drawn from a 40-hour work week which I understand is "ideal", but I would venture to say that none of us only work 40 hours a week. I wish this were the case, but unfortunately it is not especially when "admin" time is figured into the equation. With "admin time" in the equation, most of us work at least 45+ hours per week. If you were to figure in 45 hours per week per FTW (as opposed to 40), then the utilization rate drops from 126% to 112% (348/310.5 X 100)(assuming 6.9 FTEs). 2. ICANN policy staff is recommending that the Council not assign any further work as a result of them being over capacity. GNSO Council leadership has tried over and over again to figure out why this is the case and this report points out that some of the reasons staff is overworked have little if anything to do with the activities of the Council. Yet the requests to reduce staff workload to my knowledge is ONLY going to the Council. I have asked ICANN policy staff if this study and their requests to reduce work load has been sent to ICANN Executive Management and the ICANN Board, but have not gotten a response. As a council, we have zero insight or control into the work that is assigned to ICANN Policy staff by the Board or by ICANN executive management, or for that matter any request that comes in from a constituency or stakeholder group for support. From my estimates of the time as indicated in the snapshot, 50 hours of its work comes from the Board and/or Executive team while another 26 hours came from the request of new groups wanting to be constituencies. Combines that is nearly 2 full time employees (of the 6.9 that have been allocated to the GNSO). The GNSO Council has absolutely no insight nor control over this work by ICANN Policy staff. 3. I want us to engage in a constructive dialogue on this as I believe it is critical. I had hoped not to have to drill down on individual hours and numbers in this utilization study, but because ICANN policy staff is making the recommendation that we take up no new projects as a Council, I think we need to start getting into the weeds a little, so here it goes. This is not meant to question the hours spent to date on the work, but rather an eye towards looking to the future. a) This study states that new Constituencies Support/Process is 26 hours per week. I really do not believe that this will be (or even should be) the amount of this will require on an ongoing basis. That is more than ½ of a full person in man hours and that seems really high. Even if it were 10 hours, that would seem high, but lets assume for arguments sake that this could be reduced to 10 hours per week. b) The OSC seems to be winding down its activities, correct, which is another 14 hours. c) Unless a motion is approved at this Council meeting, the Whois studies would not be ongoing work, that would be another 10 hours. d) Registration Abused Policy WG is now closed and has morphed into Best Practices and UDRP, which is another 6 hours per week. e) I believe the GCOT work is completed or almost complete. Another 2 hours. f) PPSC is down in the study at 6 hours a week, but I do not see more PPSC work in the next several months making way for the Standing Committee (which has a separate time allocation). g) With all luck, this work prioritization I think can be eliminated and become a burden for the Council and its leadership - another 14 hours. Just looking at this quick math, making these changes would save us 68 hours of ICANN policy staff time. Even if we went to the 100% level at 40 hours per week (But see #1 above), that would still leave us with 18 hours to play with, which is where I would put the new WHOIS studies which look like one or more may move forward and some other items the Council wants to achieve. 4. So, if we commit to making even these small changes, what reductions can we expect from the Board and ICANN's Executive Team as that takes up nearly 2 persons' time? If even we can reduce that to 1.5 persons' time, that would give us another 20 hours to play with. 5. Conclusion: I do not believe it is fair to recommend that new projects be taken on. I believe there is still room to play with AND I would like to see the ICANN Executives and the Board make the same commitments we are making in helping to achieve realistic workloads. This is a problem, but not just a problem for the Council. This is a problem that needs to be handled with ICANN Executive Management and the Board. As such, I would like to explore with the Council the formation of an exploratory committee comprised of GNSO Council members, ICANN Executive Management and ICANN Board members to look into this issue and figure out the best path forward. The answer cannot be on a going forward basis that no more work can be done. This is all my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of my company, my stakeholder group or others in Council leadership. Jeffrey J. Neuman Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Law & Policy ________________________________ The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient you have received this e-mail message in error and any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and delete the original message. From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Stéphane Van Gelder Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:14 AM 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3aafa390976bd7174246aaa273914ef8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Jeff, you are going a wrong path. There will be a lot of time to play and work if we stop defining processes and count every hour and drill into the single character in the text. You propose us again - to set up a committee or working group to drill into working hours of people instead of dealing with real TLD matter. --andrei From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Neuman, Jeff Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 4:55 PM To: Stéphane Van Gelder; Council GNSO Subject: RE: [council] Staff utilization report I would also like to add some of my own personal comments to Stephanes on some of the issues I see with this Utilization studies and the conclusions drawn from it. 1. First, the utilization rate is drawn from a 40-hour work week which I understand is ideal, but I would venture to say that none of us only work 40 hours a week. I wish this were the case, but unfortunately it is not especially when admin time is figured into the equation. With admin time in the equation, most of us work at least 45+ hours per week. If you were to figure in 45 hours per week per FTW (as opposed to 40), then the utilization rate drops from 126% to 112% (348/310.5 X 100)(assuming 6.9 FTEs). 2. ICANN policy staff is recommending that the Council not assign any further work as a result of them being over capacity. GNSO Council leadership has tried over and over again to figure out why this is the case and this report points out that some of the reasons staff is overworked have little if anything to do with the activities of the Council. Yet the requests to reduce staff workload to my knowledge is ONLY going to the Council. I have asked ICANN policy staff if this study and their requests to reduce work load has been sent to ICANN Executive Management and the ICANN Board, but have not gotten a response. As a council, we have zero insight or control into the work that is assigned to ICANN Policy staff by the Board or by ICANN executive management, or for that matter any request that comes in from a constituency or stakeholder group for support. >From my estimates of the time as indicated in the snapshot, 50 hours of its work comes from the Board and/or Executive team while another 26 hours came from the request of new groups wanting to be constituencies. Combines that is nearly 2 full time employees (of the 6.9 that have been allocated to the GNSO). The GNSO Council has absolutely no insight nor control over this work by ICANN Policy staff. 3. I want us to engage in a constructive dialogue on this as I believe it is critical. I had hoped not to have to drill down on individual hours and numbers in this utilization study, but because ICANN policy staff is making the recommendation that we take up no new projects as a Council, I think we need to start getting into the weeds a little, so here it goes. This is not meant to question the hours spent to date on the work, but rather an eye towards looking to the future. a) This study states that new Constituencies Support/Process is 26 hours per week. I really do not believe that this will be (or even should be) the amount of this will require on an ongoing basis. That is more than ½ of a full person in man hours and that seems really high. Even if it were 10 hours, that would seem high, but lets assume for arguments sake that this could be reduced to 10 hours per week. b) The OSC seems to be winding down its activities, correct, which is another 14 hours. c) Unless a motion is approved at this Council meeting, the Whois studies would not be ongoing work, that would be another 10 hours. d) Registration Abused Policy WG is now closed and has morphed into Best Practices and UDRP, which is another 6 hours per week. e) I believe the GCOT work is completed or almost complete. Another 2 hours. f) PPSC is down in the study at 6 hours a week, but I do not see more PPSC work in the next several months making way for the Standing Committee (which has a separate time allocation). g) With all luck, this work prioritization I think can be eliminated and become a burden for the Council and its leadership another 14 hours. Just looking at this quick math, making these changes would save us 68 hours of ICANN policy staff time. Even if we went to the 100% level at 40 hours per week (But see #1 above), that would still leave us with 18 hours to play with, which is where I would put the new WHOIS studies which look like one or more may move forward and some other items the Council wants to achieve. 4. So, if we commit to making even these small changes, what reductions can we expect from the Board and ICANNs Executive Team as that takes up nearly 2 persons time? If even we can reduce that to 1.5 persons time, that would give us another 20 hours to play with. 5. Conclusion: I do not believe it is fair to recommend that new projects be taken on. I believe there is still room to play with AND I would like to see the ICANN Executives and the Board make the same commitments we are making in helping to achieve realistic workloads. This is a problem, but not just a problem for the Council. This is a problem that needs to be handled with ICANN Executive Management and the Board. As such, I would like to explore with the Council the formation of an exploratory committee comprised of GNSO Council members, ICANN Executive Management and ICANN Board members to look into this issue and figure out the best path forward. The answer cannot be on a going forward basis that no more work can be done. This is all my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of my company, my stakeholder group or others in Council leadership. Jeffrey J. Neuman Neustar, Inc. / Vice President, Law & Policy _____ The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the use of the recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient you have received this e-mail message in error and any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and delete the original message. From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Stéphane Van Gelder Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 7:14 AM 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3aafa390976bd7174246aaa273914ef8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
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@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/21cfbce914d7e30e5d906dec1a9a4eb8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi Andrei, I find it slightly puzzling that as a Councillor, you would propose to simply stop and kill off projects that the community has asked the GNSO to work on, like our restructure for instance. These projects were born out of reviews of previous processes which highlighted what were perceived as areas of improvement for us. It is the Council's responsibility to see them through. I am not sure we would be sending the right signal by just saying, after asking many people to work hard on them and committing to carrying this work out, that we are simply going to stop dead in our tracks and cancel everything. Although I understand the allure of a simple kill-switch solution, in this case I find it a little too extreme. Thanks, Stéphane Le 9 mars 2011 à 21:04, Andrei Kolesnikov a écrit :
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@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] 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
Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3aafa390976bd7174246aaa273914ef8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Stephane, thank you for the prompt response. My proposal is positively in the interest of the sizable part of the internet community interested in obtaining a new generic top level domains. They don't care much about restructuring, setting internal processes and other issues. They want ICANN (and sequentially gNSO) to give opportunity to further extend the address space. They don't see the connection between desired .blablabla and PDP WT. It is a privilege to work in such intellectual and diverse environment in our Council. The hard work and results won't disappear! However there is a problem with acceptance of the PPSC importance over CCTC issues for example. As a matter of experiment I would recommend to postpone administrative issues until new gTLD process will be open for the first applicants. Council can always return to it with much bigger practical data in hands in the future. Is it still sounds puzzling and extreme? --andrei From: Stéphane Van Gelder [mailto:stephane.vangelder@indom.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 11:27 PM To: Andrei Kolesnikov Cc: 'Council GNSO' Subject: Re: [council] Staff utilization report Hi Andrei, I find it slightly puzzling that as a Councillor, you would propose to simply stop and kill off projects that the community has asked the GNSO to work on, like our restructure for instance. These projects were born out of reviews of previous processes which highlighted what were perceived as areas of improvement for us. It is the Council's responsibility to see them through. I am not sure we would be sending the right signal by just saying, after asking many people to work hard on them and committing to carrying this work out, that we are simply going to stop dead in our tracks and cancel everything. Although I understand the allure of a simple kill-switch solution, in this case I find it a little too extreme. Thanks, Stéphane Le 9 mars 2011 à 21:04, Andrei Kolesnikov a écrit : 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@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] 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 Début du message réexpédié :
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/21cfbce914d7e30e5d906dec1a9a4eb8.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
To be honest Andrei, yes, I am even more puzzled than before. I thought your comments were about the way the Council manages its projects in general. Now it appears you are linking that to the implementation work currently being done on new gTLDs. The Council is not involved in the day-to-day implementation of the program. Further, it is my understanding that Staff has also carried out most of the work they deem necessary in preparing the AG. Delays to the program are probably more attributable to the current talks between the Board and the GAC than anything linked to ongoing GNSO Council projects. So I have to admit I don't really see the point you are making. But I'm sure we'll have lots of opportunity to discuss more over the weekend. Safe trip coming here and see you soon. Stéphane Le 9 mars 2011 à 22:15, Andrei Kolesnikov a écrit :
Stephane, thank you for the prompt response. My proposal is positively in the interest of the sizable part of the internet community interested in obtaining a new generic top level domains. They don't care much about restructuring, setting internal processes and other issues. They want ICANN (and sequentially gNSO) to give opportunity to further extend the address space. They don't see the connection between desired .blablabla and PDP WT. It is a privilege to work in such intellectual and diverse environment in our Council. The hard work and results won't disappear! However there is a problem with acceptance of the PPSC importance over CCTC issues for example. As a matter of experiment I would recommend to postpone administrative issues until new gTLD process will be open for the first applicants. Council can always return to it with much bigger practical data in hands in the future. Is it still sounds puzzling and extreme?
--andrei
From: Stéphane Van Gelder [mailto:stephane.vangelder@indom.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 11:27 PM To: Andrei Kolesnikov Cc: 'Council GNSO' Subject: Re: [council] Staff utilization report
Hi Andrei,
I find it slightly puzzling that as a Councillor, you would propose to simply stop and kill off projects that the community has asked the GNSO to work on, like our restructure for instance.
These projects were born out of reviews of previous processes which highlighted what were perceived as areas of improvement for us. It is the Council's responsibility to see them through.
I am not sure we would be sending the right signal by just saying, after asking many people to work hard on them and committing to carrying this work out, that we are simply going to stop dead in our tracks and cancel everything.
Although I understand the allure of a simple kill-switch solution, in this case I find it a little too extreme.
Thanks,
Stéphane
Le 9 mars 2011 à 21:04, Andrei Kolesnikov a écrit :
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@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] 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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participants (4)
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Andrei Kolesnikov
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Liz Gasster
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Neuman, Jeff
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Stéphane Van Gelder