Proposal: Reorganization of the Project Management

[Alon Bar-Lev]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Moran Goldboim" <mgoldboi at redhat.com>
> To: "Dave Neary" <dneary at redhat.com>
> Cc: "arch" <arch at ovirt.org>, board at ovirt.org
> Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 1:06:07 AM
> Subject: Re: Proposal:  Reorganization of the Project Management
> 
> -weekly meetings has been ran by very few people mostly by doing
> monologues- we might want to change the agenda of the meetings.

Hello,

Please do understand that these 'weekly' meetings are synchronous mechanism of communication. Provided a project is small or controlled by a group that is located at specific territory, it might be productive.

However, asynchronous communication between parties allows much larger audience to participate. But there is some magic to make it happen.

Although people thing of mailing list a good mechanism to communicate asynchronously with the world, it is very hard to actually manage a process.

A good mechanism is to have a project manager that pulls upon demand the relevant parties and submit summaries to the public, in this method each party gets only the relevant approaches and provides the response based on his responsibility, while the project manager integrate the information into a complete picture, to be reviewed by the public.

A better mechanism is to automate the system using information technology. Bugzilla is not the perfect tool but it is able to provide some remedy if used correctly. Currently, we misuse bugzilla instead of producing value from it we are working against it. In a nut shell, we need upstream bugzilla where PM and QE can participate at early planning stage, we need to separate products per anything that has its own release cycle, we should have proper milestones per upstream release, and we should have proper assignment per component. After we use bugzilla correctly we can evaluate other tools to provide even better productivity, but let's first utilize our current resources.

After we organize bugzilla, it will be easier to manage the process, as every task will be assigned to a specific contact, product, component, version and milestone, tasks such as build issues and integration are included, no more splitting information between four different systems.

A substitution of the synchronous weekly meeting would be a list of tasks to update, and focused discussion with the relevant parties on issues that request project width attention.

Regards,
Alon Bar-Lev.