RE: [tracker] and ACTION "everyone"

On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 07:05 -0700, Paul Cotton wrote:
> > (1) The first item of feedback is that Tracker should allow actions
> > to be assigned to "everyone".
> 
> I think this feature is very important.  There are many times when Chairs want
>  to assign an action to everyone on a WG (e.g. review a specific proposal)
>  to emphasize the importance of the work item.

Well, there are times when you really need every member of the WG to
do something like agree to some patent policy thing and you want it
tracked until the last person has done it; I tend to use
WBS surveys for those.

But to emphasize important work, the last thing I'd recommend
is to record an action on "everybody"; that's a well-documented
anti-pattern:

[[
This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody,
and Nobody. 

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done
it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got mad because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that
Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody,
when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.


Dr. Ronald A. Cline
]]

I recommend assigning actions on two people; if they both review
and comment on some proposal, you can bet that it'll get the
attention of the rest of the group. If one of them can't manage,
you've got some redundancy. If you can't get two people
to take an action, you haven't gotten agreement from the group
to really take on the task.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 18 October 2007 14:30:39 UTC