[council] Staff utilization report

Wed Mar 9 12:14:11 UTC 2011

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 We have already deleted several projects that were either no longer active or just plain finished.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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