On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 4:29 PM Doug Hellmann <doug@doughellmann.com> wrote:

We are consistently presented with the challenges of trying to convince
our large community to change direction, collaborate across team
boundaries, and work on features that require integration of several
services. Other threads with candidate questions include discussions of
some significant technical changes people would like to see in
OpenStack's implementation. Taking one of those ideas, or one of your
own idea, as inspiration, consider how you would make the change happen
if it was your responsibility to do so.

Which change management approaches that we have used unsuccessfully in
the past did you expect to see work? Why do you think they failed?

One of the ideas that we tested in the past which I was expecting to succeed was the Architecture WG [1]. It was a very interesting approach to see some experts discussing about common pitfalls and see what we could change, but I personnally feel we felt short in terms of deliverables because those discussions weren't really engaged with the corresponding project teams they were impacting.

On the other hand, another WG, the API WG (now a SIG) is a great example of success because inputs were directly coming from contributors coming from different projects and seeing common patterns.

I can also recall a few discussions we had at Summits (and later Forum) that were promising but did lack of resources for acting on changes. To summarize my thoughts I already said earlier, nothing can happen if you can't have contributors that are familiar with the respective projects that are impacted and that can dedicate time for it (meaning you also need to convince your respective managements of the great benefits it can be).

Which would you like to try again? How would you do things differently?

There a couple of things I'd get things done. Say at least, OSC supporting projects microversions at their latest. Also, I'd like to see most of the projects supporting upgrades and follow the old Design Tenets we agreed on a couple of years before.

How to make this work ? Well, no magic bullet :

1/ make sure that we can get projects sign-off on any initiative (for example a TC goal) and make sure you have a champion on each project that is reasonably expert on this project to address the need.

2/ have the SIGs/WGs providing us feedback (like Public WG tries to achieve) and make sure we can have resources matching those feature/bugfix requests.

3/ accept the fact that an architectural redesign can span multiple cycles and ensure that the change is itself iterative with no upgrade impact.

What new suggestions do you have for addressing this recurring
challenge?

We currently address at the PTGs cross-project talks in a 1:1 fashion (for example Nova-Cinder). We also have Forum sessions that span multiple projects impact. Now that the PTG directly follows the Forum, it would be a good idea to make sure that ideas that pop up at the Forum are actually translated in real PTG discussions for each service. Yeah, we'll work 6 days and it's going to be stressful, but let's take the opportunity for focusing on real actionable items by having 6 days for it.

-Sylvain

[1] https://github.com/openstack/arch-wg

--
Doug