So after ~18 minutes of the raid leader trying to set up assignments for the Lei Shen fight, which kept getting messed up due to a mix of senility and indecisiveness, I realized that an add-on was required.
And so the Raidminder add-on was born!
The point is simple: plenty of fights require some raid assignments. Some of them may only be relevant 5 minutes into the fight (late phases in long fights), some of them may conflict with previous assignments (Lei Shen positions have to change a bit on second transition), sometimes in a progress run the assignments change every few minutes as you get a better idea of the fight, sometimes you're just having a very slow progress run and you wipe for a solid half hour until the relevant phase even comes up. People forget their assignments; that's natural, understandable, and very human.
Raidminder simply gives a raid leader (and assistants) somewhere to write those assignments. You get room for a few short notes for each raid member, and whatever you write there will also appear on a little movable frame for that raider. As a convenient bonus, you can also move the frames around so you can plan the fight tactics a bit more visually (why settle for just writing "north conduit" on a few scattered frames, when you can just grab those frames and group them up at the top of your screen?).
Now, sadly, I'm new on the forum so it won't let me actually post links, but the add-on is called Raidminder and is available on wowinterface.com. I'd love to know if people think the add-on (or merely the idea) is good, or bad, or a good start that really needs more features
[Edit]
Many people who saw this immediately wanted an add-on that let them send messages automatically as a response to boss events. So I wrote one!
Raidbot - The easy way to lead raids