I know Dave. I know a bit of Dave’s history and respect his accomplishments. In a nutshell, with respect to my colleagues who have already replied, it would be a mistake to dismiss his diatribe as a "rant." He makes good points, and I hope, in this missive that grows longer the more I think about it, that the ARRL would do well to listen to his points and to react to them by communication that deflates the rhetoric but addresses the concerns that he raises... that he has been raising frequently since 2012, to his frustration. Dave is a legitimate political leader of thousands of ARRL members. I’ve heard his argument regarding proposed ground-up rewrites of LoTW many times - in fact, I believe his opposition and the lack of an actual detailed definition of a project has been the reason that the LoTW product hasn’t moved in years. He is correct, factually. His criticism is based on his personal history as a contributor to major projects and as an engineer. Dave writes and maintains the DXLab suite of products that are more feature-rich than anything on the market - and they're free. Say what you will about Dave's personality, but he knows about all facets of logging, rig interfaces, and the needs and complaints of the DX Community. He has a large and loyal following - his DXLab group on groups.io has over 5,500 members. The ARRL-LOTW group has 4,800 members, to give you an idea as to size. Both groups came over from Yahoo! He has great points. Mr. Minster (multiple Davids on the exchange), you have announced an initiative with very little detail. I was hoping you'd flesh this out a bit more, and I was hoping you'd have a conversation with the Board with some back and forth before you went public with a third party. One of DB's issues is that he believes that we (the ARRL) have not considered the scope of our project to replace LoTW - he has made this public: *"**I would expect that ARRL has list of current or proposed Requirements that they would want the Logbook to perform."* I wrote Kristen with my thoughts on inception of projects in general in December. I recommended the ITSM approach. The last few efforts I've run (that each ran more than $2M) When an organization has billions of dollars in development capital, or millions of dollars in investment capital, is a government agency or publicly traded, there is governance that makes sure that projects are a prudent use of funding. The night I wrote her, I explained the ITSM defined stages of a project, which I believe she understood. 1. Assessment - *What are we going to do and why do we need to do it* 2. Design -* Using Assessment, how are we going to do it?* 3. Planning - Now that we have 1 and 2, Let's set milestone and goals, create tasks, resource requirements and deadlines. 4. Implementation - Execute the plan, test, roll out to the users. 5. Support Help people use the product, fix issues, loop change requests back to Assessment. These are recursive - each stage can be done more than once, and failures in a higher number stage should be referred to more basic steps. *ASSESSMENT* Now, please, where are we in Logbook 2.0? I submit we are early in the Assessment stage. I think that is what we need to clearly communicate ONCE WE DETERMINE how we are going to assess REQUIREMENTS based on USER INPUT. This is what our members know, intuitively, that we are missing. Having worked in product management, sales and marketing over half my career, I’ve learned that announcement of an initiative mustn’t predate solid goals that define an initiative and can be referenced as milestones. Coming up with a name is easy... when I was CTO at a $2B company, there was a contest to name a new $100M ERP project. It was named “Meteor” because a “meteor crashed into the Earth and killed all the dinosaurs.” Within 90 days, the company lost the valuable brain trust that had created the legacy ERP applications, including one that paid 200,000 employees for Dell. They saw THEMSELVES as the dinosaurs and they bailed. The CIO was fired and the project was years late. I have many other stories, some with famous monikers that you may have heard. My ex-wife was on the PC Jr. Project (Peanut) at IBM. So, let's move forward with an ASSESSMENT, develop a method of USER INPUT (Contest? Questionnaire? We need the ability for ANYONE to have input, to COALESCE the Ideas and winnow them. WE SHOULD MOVE QUICKLY and get this done so we can move forward. Let's NOT FORGET in the ASSESSMENT that we keep in mind that SCOPE needs to be defined to avoid "boiling the ocean" and RESOURCES for design and implementation need to be defined. I frankly don't see ARRL IT doing this. DESIGN This is typically where engineers jump first. You've already heard it. "Which cloud? Which Database? What development tools? An project planning tool and a project manager named... PLANNING, etc... More if you want it. 73, Mickey N4MB On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 1:04 PM Minster, David NA2AA (CEO) <dminster@arrl.org> wrote:
Dear ODV,
As you know, I am very open to your guidance and advice. It is key to my success, and ultimately the success of ARRL. I firmly believe that.
I have read the diatribe many of you received from Dave Bernstein, AA6YQ, regarding LoTW.
I have authored a private response to him – which I have not sent – but if you were to read it, you would conclude that it is firm and brutally honest.
So here’s my question: how do YOU take Dave’s soapbox rants and self-aggrandizing, especially when it comes to attacking the CEO (who he did not copy on his rant)?
Do you feel it is something worthy of me attempting to manage, or have you (like many) given up on him as a lost cause and feel that I should just ignore his feedback?
I’d really like to have him as a resource, but I am struggling with his complete and sustained inability to collaborate and his non-factual statements used to further his inflexible points of view.
This is an important issue because creating a collaborative environment with members is everything to me. And it is something that must be managed.
David _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv