Management Board Meeting of 27th June 2003

Status Report on Earned Value Management (EVM)
J. Ferguson, the EVM Project Leader, announced that EVM progress reporting was now well in hand and entering a routine phase of operation. Some 2400 requests for details of the current status of activities had been issued to the holders of the 1750 active LHC work units, and reports had now been received for over 80% of those concerned. The EVM Project team was working closely with the divisional coordinators to improve the quality of data and, for the outstanding 20%, to understand why reports had not been submitted and to resolve any problems. The team would also be meeting the divisional coordinators the following week to set the priorities for the next stages of the EVM Project, which would subsequently be reviewed with the LHC Project Leader, L. Evans. The first EVM-based status report was due to be presented to the Finance Committee in September 2003, followed by a report to the LHC Cost and Schedule Review Committee.
Concerning the integration of data on the special contributions from non-Member States, some 80% of the work had been completed, with a number of issues remaining to be resolved on the Canadian, Japanese and Russian contributions. Work would continue during the coming weeks to resolve the outstanding difficulties in that connection. In conjunction with the Finance Division, the EVM team would also be pursuing its efforts to develop a contract alignment tool to assist Project and Divisional Planning Officers, which he hoped would be ready towards the end of August.
The Management Board briefly discussed the potential time lag between the recording of earned value and the execution of payments, as well as the need for consistency in the handling of downpayments, and agreed that those and other issues would be examined in detail at a meeting in July between the Director-General, the Director of Finance and the division leaders concerned to ensure a common basis of understanding.

Outcome of the June Committee Meetings
The Director-General summarised the main results of the meetings of the Council and its committees during the week of 16-20 June. In particular, the Council had approved: 1) the Medium-term Plan for 2004-2007, including some additional resources for the urgent consolidation of infrastructure; 2) the overall budget figures for 2004, taking note of the proposed budget estimates for 2005-2007 and of the projections up to 2010; 3) the Management's revised proposal for the introduction of Local Staff; and 4) the new organisational structure for CERN proposed by the Director-General Designate, Dr Aymar, including the appointment of Professor J. Engelen as Deputy Director-General (Chief Scientific Officer) and Mr A. Naudi as Director of Finance and Human Resources (Chief Financial Officer), with Dr L. Evans to continue as LHC Project Leader. The Council had also approved the donation by the Swiss Confederation of the former Palais de l'Equilibre, which, following its arrival on the CERN site in early 2004, would be reassembled as the "CERN Globe of Innovation" and fitted out as a centre for public visits and technology transfer activities. CERN was currently pursuing the study of Stages II and III of the project for a unified control centre and an executive meeting room.
The Director-General noted that, in the light of the above-mentioned decisions, the Management's priorities for the coming months would include the drawing-up of a detailed consolidation plan for presentation at the next round of committee meetings in September and the implementation of the Local Staff scheme. In the latter context, he underlined that LS positions would be opened for activities defined in the Morges III exercise and that the other activities would remain outsourced, either in result-oriented contracts or the newly defined Field Support Units, except for the so-called business cases, which were still under review. The Management Board took note that the determination of which technical activities could be entrusted to Field Support Units was expected to be agreed in the next few days so that LS vacancy notices for mechanics and technicians could start to be published in early July, as scheduled. The same exercise would be performed for secretarial support later in 2003. The Management Board also took note that all recruitment in Career Paths A and B from 1^st July 2003 onwards would be under the LS scheme and that there would be no special transfer from materials to personnel for recruitment in Career Path C, which would take place exclusively within the divisional complements agreed at the Morges III meeting in November 2002.