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You and i - RFEs, CAAC, CEAC and the IBM i Plan

By Steve Will posted Thu September 30, 2021 12:32 PM

  
For the IBM i team at IBM, it's Fall Plan time again. I kicked off the formal process this morning with the development #team. We have a "big" fall plan this year - several major projects are among the few hundred "line items" our team needs to evaluate.

Among those are sets of Requests For Enhancement (RFEs) being championed by the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) and the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC).  (COMMON: https://www.common.org/home ; COMMON Europe: https://comeur.org/)

Acting in their advisory role, these two groups of dedicated volunteers look at EVERY RFE which comes in related to #IBMi and #RDi -- and then they select the RFEs which they deem to be most important for us to address in our plan.

Our developers look at the RFEs in parallel, and then during the Fall Plan we size the effort and prioritize. Sometimes we can't do something the CAAC/CEAC put on the lists, but then we have face to face meetings and explain our reasoning. ("Face to face" has been over Webex recently, but we all HOPE to be in person sometime in 2022!) Very often (over 60% of the time) the RFEs on the CAAC/CEAC lists get into our plans.

While there are several factors that go into deciding which RFEs result in development work, the input we get from the CAAC and CEAC is very helpful.

For the wider #IBMi community in general, I want you to know we appreciate your input -- in whatever (business-appropriate) form -- and especially in RFEs. We get great ideas from you, and sometimes get great support for ideas we already wanted to do. So, thanks. I know it can take a while (sometimes as much as a few years) for an RFE to result in delivered function -- some things take a while, and some things need a major release -- but we are happy to have those RFEs sitting there, ready to be marked "Delivered" when they are released.

Input from the #IBMi community has always been incredibly important in moving the product and the community forward.  This is one very good example of our cooperative strategy. 



[I have just posted something very much like this in the IBM i Professionals group on LinkedIn. I decided it was worth a wider distribution, though it's possible more people will read it THERE than HERE.  It's hard to predict.  Anyway, if you are reading this, you should probably be a member of that group.  Link here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1107217/]

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