Business Engagement for the Research and Computing Sector: IT-Experiments Technical Coordination Chairs and Secretaries

One chair and one secretary will be appointed for each of the LHC experiments. One chair and one secretary will be appointed also for protoDUNE and the Small-Medium Experiments (SMEs). The IT Technical Coordination Chairs and Secretaries report to the Research and Computing Business Engagement Manager for the time they dedicated to the function.

Goals:

  • Understand and follow the IT needs and requirements from the experiments in a proactive way
  • Collect experiment communities feedback at all timescales to promote a bidirectional synergy: tackling operational issues but also identify opportunities for joint exchanges and activities
  • Ensure strategic IT technical information reaches the experiment communities in a timely manner
  • Identify in advance potential issues at an early stage and escalate to ensure follow-up, mitigation and fixing
  • Time: 10% FTE as a Connector. The appointments are for 2 years.

Chair functions:

  • Maintain a good level of understanding of IT Activities and Services
  • Proactively build and maintain trust based relationships with the experiment community.
  • Ensure that CERN-IT strategy and decisions reach the experiment communities in a form that they can easily be understood
  • Proactively keep the relevant levels of CERN-IT hierarchy informed of IT-related concerns within the CERN user communities
  • Chair the coordination of technical meetings between IT department and its CERN user communities
  • Ensure the agenda of the meetings is well prepared in advance. Identifying relevant topics from the experiment community and the IT department to be addressed and ensuring the relevant experts, should be needed, are present at the meeting Secretary

Functions:

  • Get experience with the stakeholders and functions of IT Department and gain awareness of global IT needs for the broad CERN Experiments community
  • Take the notes of the meetings, keep an action list up to date. Ensure the notes and the action lists are stored and distributed in a timely manner shortly after the meeting
  • Agree on the meeting dates and venues. Reserve rooms, setup video conferencing (if needed), and help the chair in handling INDICO
  • Assistance to the chair: tasks and follow-up actions might be delegated to secretaries

Key Skills:

  • Strong interpersonal skills. In particular:
    • Listening, empathy, tact and diplomacy
    • Build relationships based on trust and respect
    • Handle/defuse potentially conflicting situations
  • Ability to see beyond the surface of a problem to the root cause (technical or human)
  • Ability to succinctly summarise problems
  • Ability to identify further engagement opportunities, thinking out of the box and building from candidate technical expertise(s)

Contact persons: Simone Campana and Xavier Espinal

For reference: IT Internal Selection Process for Part-Time Roles