Hi EPDP Project Team,

I apologize up front for the document explosion. I’m sending these working drafts now, but we will use dedicated time on next Tuesday for me to present this package. We will specifically review the Gantt chart/project plan pages. As you know, we have to obtain Council approval of our plan and we are targeting the 22 Aug 2019 Council meeting. As Janis mentioned on the today’s call however, we will reassess the plan based on outcomes of the Los Angeles face-to-face. You’ll recall that we need an approved plan to request final resources from the ICANN Board that will allow the EPDP to fulfill its charter.

One final thing to consider when reviewing the plan at a high-level and as communicated in Marrakech, an aspirational target was set for Dec 2019 to launch an Initial Report for public comment. You’ll see this represented in the work products that make up this package. I’d like to reinforce the notion that this plan attempts to allocate tasks based on the number of hours it takes for the group to deliberate the policy topics and agree on some sort of outcome. While the project plan is represented on a 5 business day work week, in reality that only translates to 4 or 6 hours of conference calls per week. So, it is important to think of tasks being resourced in those terms instead of being driven only by calendar dates. As an example and assuming we do not take any breaks, considering plenary calls are 2 hours and secondary/LC calls are 1.5 hours, and finally considering total hours for the face-to-face in LA, it only equates to a total of 38 hours to deliberate topics verbally through 11 Sep 2019.

Lastly, the full project plan on pages 5 to 8 is subject to change as I continue to refine individual tasks, durations and dependencies in preparation for Tuesday. I wanted to allow enough time for the group to become familiar with the package so that we can spend more time on the detailed tasks that define the critical path.

EPDP-P2 Project and Work Plan Package:

• The general intent is this will be compiled and reviewed once per month in preparation for our planning/progress, but also to prepare for updates required by the GNSO Council. Individual work products will be updated more frequently and as necessary to meet the project communication and planning requirements.
• Page 1 - Simple Gantt, mostly for external communications; note the far right will need to be confirmed and updated after agreement is reached on the full project plan.
• Page 2- Fact sheet, we’ve all seen this before. I’ll just note that the % complete will be derived from the four primary phases of the project plan further down.
• Page 3 – Project SitRep, this is also a part of the GNSO Council Project list, but it can also be used to communicate a more detailed status externally. Note, the Status/Condition codes feature can change as a result of negative impacts to the project. Based on PDP3.0 implementations, this may trigger interactions with the GNSO Council leadership and the full GNSO Council as necessary.
• Page 4 – Collapsed version of the Gantt Project Plan; I suspect this will be the ultimate work product we take to the GNSO Council for approval. It is rows 35-189 that we need to give the most attention over the next few weeks.
• Pages 5 – 8 – represent the full expanded version of the project plan.
• For the most part, what we’ve accomplished so far as a group is what I’ve attempted to represent as actual tasks and durations (rear-view mirror planning of sorts).
• Rows 35 – 73 is the work that is ahead of us going to LA around the use cases and a few of the topics the group will likely focus on shortly after LA.
• For now, (46-109) I’ve used a repeatable template that covers the topic over a duration of 4 weeks that includes a 1^st and 2^nd reading with some sort of outcome.
• For the most part, Priority 2 topics are decoupled from the Initial Report; we’ll need to spend some time figuring out how these influence our overall plan.
• Row 171 is a parking lot of sorts for items we need to circle back on or unplanned events. Unplanned work of course has a chance to severely impact our schedule. Think of this section a project scope radar. We should investigate any other potential topics that can influence our scope.
• The Key Events section (Row 194 – 262) is mostly work behind the scenes to prepare for face-to-face events but placed here to track overall project activities. It is not connected to the critical path.
• The Initial and Final Reports sections: I don’t think we need to change the tasks so much (mostly template form) but we do have flexibility in adjusting duration and delivery dates. The real work resides in the EPDP Deliberations section where the critical path lives.
• Post EPDP activities are tasks after the EPDP is delivered to the Council but placed there as the Policy department owns the project up and until the Board takes action.
• Page 9 is an initial draft of our work plan inherited Marika’s use case calendar. It will be updated each week with the tasks from the project plan so that the group focuses only on what is front of us. This will be migrated to Google Sheets. It also contains a link to the Action Items list that is located on the wiki. I suggest we migrate this to a Google Doc as well. It will allow for easier management of the items and we can report easier from it over the wiki.

Happy reading. I’ll be glad to answer any initial questions over the list until we meet on Tuesday.

Thank you.

B

Berry Cobb

@berrycobb

GNSO Policy Consultant