EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY

Re-Engineering Project: First Steps: 2002-01-10 Quick-off Meeting LSO-MIN-ESO-90000-1/v-1.1

Prepared	Olivier Hainaut	2002-01-10
Reviewed	Martin Kurster	2002-02-22
Released	Jorge Melnick	2002-

0- INTRODUCTION

1- The Rules of the Game

The current MET, 360CAT and NTT Team are going to be merged in one unique Science Operation Department (SciOp), whose mission will be to operate the optical telescopes of ESO at La Silla.

O.Hainaut was appointed to lead this re-engineering. The plan of the SciOp department should be ready ~June 2002, and its implementation should start immediately after that, to be complete at the end of 2002.

The structure of the department and the transition from the current teams to this department are completely free, for us to decide and implement.

Some notes about a related point: the new building. The NTT needs a new control room (various technical and non-technical reasons). This will take place in a building whose construction is about to start, funded on 2001 budget. It was possible to extend the size of the building to 300sq.m (budget and available space), and a pre-project of multiple control room was prepared to substantiate the budget. This is meant to open the possibility of a common control room for NTT and 3.6m and/or 2.2m. However, it is important to note that this is a possibility, not an obligation --to be decided during the re-engineering phase. While the shape (30mx10m) is set, we still have some time to decide of the internal organization of the that building, which can become anything between an NTT control room to a SciOp building. This is for us to decide.

Additional note about the location: the schedule is extremely tight. We still have a few DAYs to discuss a change, but no more. Moreover, a change of location should have extremely strong reasons, i.e. at this point "a nicer view" is not strong enough.

At this point, there is no plan for future extension of this building (either horizontally or 2d floor). Of course, one can always dream, but on a realistic point of view, this is all we will get.

2- Motivation of the re-engineering

The main motivations for this restructuration are the following:

• Less telescopes (NTT, 3p6, part of 2p2) than when the Teams were formed, and 2p2Team will be dismantled in some nearby future. The advantages of several Teams therefore vanish and become useless duplication of resources.
• Have a structure that is compatible with that of Paranal

In addition, a single department has other advantages:

• More efficient: many tasks are duplicated in the 3 teams and could be done only once
• More flexibility
• More time to do more interesting things (e.g. research, for the astronomers, more involvement for the TIOs, etc)

The following points were mentioned:

• We have to learn from Paranal: what is good in their way to operate (so that we can copy it), what is bad (so that we don't make the same mistake). We shall
•  Get and synthesize the Paranal SciOp Plan,
•   Interview several Paranal SciOp members (not only management!)  and synthesize their impressions and opinions.
• We will take into account the results of the last "Organizational Climate Survey"
• We want to keep the good things of the current team structure (team spirit, identification with the job, responsibility, etc...)
• We should take the opportunity of this re-engineering to stream-line and eliminate some of the tasks that do not belong to SciOp. Some examples were mentioned:
• While we will do the scheduling of the team members, we should not spend time dealing with TraM (either it is improved so that it becomes transparent, or someone else deals with it).
• Most of the overtime sheets filling should be automatic (e.g. from TraM).

 We mentioned the possibility to have a (fraction of) a secretary for taking care of these secretarial work.

3- Success Factor

In order to measure the success of the re-engineering, the items were defined:

• User satisfaction: the satisfaction of the Visiting Astronomers must remain at least as high as it is now. This will be estimated from the End of Mission Reports. We noted that it will be difficult to increase this, as the satisfaction index is already very high.
• Staff satisfaction: while we don't have a metrics to directly measure it, everybody should be more happy of his situation in the new department than currently. Everybody should have more interesting things to do.

4- Tasks of the SciOp Department

We broadly defined the major tasks of the SciOp Department (the order is of no significance):

• Night Operation
• Day Operation,  including maintenance tasks to be performed by SciOp
• Astronomical Operation,  including
• Visitor, Service, ToO support
• Calibration Plan
• Quality Control
• Administration & Management,  including
• Scheduling
• Budget
• Goals & objectives, performance evaluation
• Upgrade & Projects
• Training,  including
• Cross-team training (e.g. ex-3.6 to ex-NTT)
• Intra-team training (e.g. astronomers to TIOs)
• External (e.g LSUniversity, Stgo, USA...)
• Metrics
• Downtime
• Tel&Ins performance
• ...
• Configuration Control
• Access control to Telescope
• Through the network
• Real time Monitoring (Web Cams)
• ++.....
• Documentation, including
• "paper" (manuals etc)
• Web

We also have 2 items that are specific to the transition period:

• Control Room,  including
• common control room?
• final internal design of the new building
• Interface definition, i.e. interface between SciOp and the world (i.e. other departments at la Silla, other ESO divisions, outside world

5- Actions

• O.Hainaut: gather documentation (PO SciOp plan, Team Theme, Organizational climate survey)
• XX: interview Paranal SciOp staff
• EVERYBODY: create a working group for each of the major tasks defined above.