Team-building in Chamonix
By the time these words go to press, we’ll be nearing the end of the Chamonix workshop, which has been widely reported as the place where the LHC re-start schedule will be discussed. This is true, but Chamonix is about much more than "just" that. I’ll be reporting the main conclusions of the workshop in an e-mail to CERNois on the evening of Friday 6 February. In the meantime, I’d like to set out my reasons for reviving the Chamonix tradition.
The Chamonix workshop is all about team-building. It’s a unique opportunity for people from the experiments and accelerators to come together away from the pressures of daily life at CERN. I may have joked in my talk to the CERN community on 12 January about ski-ing, but be under no illusion: Chamonix is about work. True, there’s time in the afternoons for people to spend as they please, but the working day starts early in the morning and lasts until late into the evening. It’s a week of hard work and hard play: there’s no better way to build team spirit.
The Chamonix meetings began with LEP, and I remember from my days as a CERN staff member the valuable role they played. They ran for 12 years, covering the entire LEP era. The format is simple: for a week during the annual winter shutdown of the accelerators, a group of people representing the accelerators and the experiments takes time away from CERN to review the past year and plan the next. The objective from the outset is to reach consensus – the best starting point for delivering clear and realistic objectives. As a result, the Chamonix workshops established a reputation for allowing complex technical and logistical issues to be solved, and for reliably setting operation schedules for the LEP machine. It is my wish that this become the case for the LHC era.
This year, the key task at Chamonix is to work out a realistic timetable to get the LHC up and running safely, and reliably delivering colliding beams to the experiments. We’ll be focusing on what we learned in commissioning without beam last year, what we learned with beam, and on how we can establish stable operating conditions for the LHC this year and into the following phase of routine operation. It’s a tall order for a week away in the Alps, but Chamonix’s track record speaks for itself: an intense week of consensus-forming around a realistic set of objectives unites us all and can deliver the results we need. Look out for my e-mail on 6 February for the key conclusions, and if you want more information, Steve Myers will be reviewing the workshop in the Main Auditorium on 24 February with presentations by the session chairs. In between, there will be a series of presentations around the Lab.
