TEC Meeting on 27/09/2002

Participants:      Isabel Bejar-Alonso, Margrit Burry, Sudeshna Datta-Cockeril, Sue Foffano,        Andrée Fontbonne, Peter Sievers, Mick Storr, Mauro Taborelli, Sylvain Weisz

Excused:           André Arn, Paula Carvalho-Correia, Enrico Chiaveri, Friedmann Eder, Francois Fluckiger, Michelle Mazerand, Erwin Mosselmans, Linda Orr-Easo, Alberto Scaramelli, Josi Schinzel, Tony Shave, Marc Tavlet, Myriam Veyrat, Davide Vite

1.      AOB and matters arising:

          Sue Foffano explained the difficulties to handle correctly the EDH authorisation procedure when a person is detached to another division. In the case of a training request, the required signatures are those of the supervisor, of the group leader and of the DTO:  only the re-assignment of the direct supervisor is entered in the database and there is no provision to inform EDH when a person is detached. The DTO of the lending division is thus still in the EDH routing while the DTO of the new hosting division, who usually pays for the training, is not. A proper routing requires the collaboration between the DTO’s of the two divisions concerned, and the DTO of the lending division should forward the request to the DTO of the hosting division. This unfortunately cannot be automatised since the relevant information is not in the database.

          Sue Froffano also mentioned that BHT would soon be replaced by CET (CERN Expenditure Tracking) that will include facilities for contract follow-up, multi-annual reporting and earned value management (EVM). The new software will be presented on various occasions in public meetings (English + French). There may be a need for dedicated training and access to the Training Centre facilities may be required for hands-on sessions.

          Isabel Bejar-Alonso reported on a few examples of support allocated to external training, following the procedure described in http://edms.cern.ch/document/335168/1.3 (see minutes of the TEC meeting on 02/07/2002). The examples can be accessed by the DTO, once logged in EDMS, at http://edmsoraweb.cern.ch:8001/cedar/navigation.tree?top=1002618277&open=1002618277 : these are cases for an MAA (Management et Administration des affaire) diploma, an MBA at the HEC of Lausanne and a Project Management course (no diploma, alternative to 1-PM).

2.  News from the Management & Communication Programme

          Sudeshna Datta-Cockerill presented the list of courses recently organized within the standard M&C training programme. We had to cancel 4 sessions due to a low number of applications (<7- 8 enrolments per session) out of the 18 sessions scheduled from September to December 2002. Moreover, the Project Management course on Quality Control had to be cancelled once again.

    Sudeshna also presented the real cost of these courses, clearly indicating that, on average, only about 3/4 of this cost is actually charged to the divisions. However, there is a large variation of the cost per day of training that essentially reflects the cost of the trainer, when he/she is a professional consultant. The recommendation of the JTB is to charge the real cost to the division and this will be applied in 2003. The TEC agreed to continue with the current system for 2002, unless the financial balance of the M&C Training budget becomes problematic.

          The electronic questionnaire proposed by the M&C WG (see minutes of TEC meeting on 02/07/02) is almost ready. Sudeshna presented its form and content directly on the web version (available at https://web4.cern.ch/test-rfa/td/tq-step1.asp) that has been provided by Peter Jurcso from HR/RFA. The DTO’s and Division Leaders will have a few days to test this questionnaire and give their feed back. It will then be sent to all those who followed at least one M&C course during the last 5 years.

3.      News from the Technical Training Programme

Mick Storr announced the installation of the Web-base training portal that is currently accessible through the Training and Development web pages. This gives access to both technical and management/communication courses. The courses provided by “SkillSoft” have been agreed by the M&C training responsible, however Sudeshna and Linda will contact those who enrol to better understand their training expectation. The cost of a 3 months access is 30 CHF for courses on Microsoft packages, 50 CHF for other technical training and 100 CHF for M&C training. Sue Foffano asked to provide a warning to the DTO’s in case someone registers to a course but does not follow it.

The FEED2002 lecture series just started with the opening lecture of John Pett and the first lecture of Guy Baribaud to be followed by 4 sessions in October, 4 sessions in November and 3 sessions in December. These lectures are recorded and will be available through the web. Mick underlined that it is an opportunity to retain and transmit the experience of CERN staff that will soon retire: he furthermore asked the DTOs to identify potential candidates for “transfer of knowledge” lecture series.

 Mick also gave a guided tour of the MIT OpenCourseWare web portal accessible at http://web.mit.edu/ocw . It aims at providing course material from MIT’s faculty on a worldwide basis, to be used either directly by learners or to be introduced by educators in their own curricula. The archiving by CERN of the academic training lectures or of series as ELEC2002 follows a similar process and should publicize the Organisation as a centre of knowledge and education.

4.      Next meeting:

The next TEC meeting will take place on November 15^th .

                                                                                    Sylvain Weisz