IT Technical-User Meeting (ITUM): chair and secretary

Goals:

  • ITUM provides a technical update on IT department services, including ‘heads-up’ information on future plans and is aimed at technical experts within CERN's Experiments and User Communities.
  • Exchange technical information on IT department services and plans
  • Understand the impact on users for planned service changes and trends
  • Ensure strategic IT technical information reaches the ITUM communities
  • Identify in advance potential issues at an early stage and escalate to ensure follow-up, mitigation and fixing
  • ITUM Meeting Frequency: 3 meetings per year
  • Time: 10% FTE as a Connector as a chair, 10% FTE as a Connector as a secretary. The appointments are for 2 years.

Chair functions:

  • ITUM is not a decision-making meeting however feedback raised, either at the meeting or directly to the meeting Chair, is passed to Business Engagement Management.
  • Understand where follow-up discussions should be organised on specific topics, either using existing Business Engagement meeting structures or on an ad-hoc basis.
  • Document feedback on topics addressed by the meetings and ensure monthly follow-up via the itum mailing list on agreed actions, remind deadlines and potentially heads-up on new topics for the upcoming meetings
  • Maintain a good level of understanding of IT Activities and Services
  • Proactively build and maintain trust based relationships with the experiment community.
  • Ensure the agenda of the meetings is well prepared in advance. Identifying relevant topics from the ITUM community and the IT department to be addressed and ensuring the relevant experts, should be needed, are present at the meeting

Secretary Functions:

  • Maintain a good level of understanding of IT Activities and Services
  • 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