March 3, 1997

Dear Colleagues,

Don Reeder and I attended a meeting in Washington with US Atlas, FNAL/BNL Lab Directors, and DOE/NSF on February 25. The funding agencies wanted to be assured that the Project Management was sufficiently strong to answer the concerns raised at HEPAP. The next HEPAP meeting features, on March 14, an afternoon session devoted solely to LHC management of experiments with talks by the collaborations, the funding agencies, and the lab management. I will present for US CMS, while Don will be there wearing another hat.

Things move rapidly, so that it is hard to communicate with the US CMS Collaboration as well as is required. As an upshot of the February 25 meeting there are 3 organization charts and related items accompanying this message. First, there is the US CMS Project Office. Nothing is new, except that we have filled in most of the boxes, which makes the case that we have a functioning project office already. The parentheses mean either that the person is not yet officially on board or that the person was appointed pro tem, and that an election is pending.

The second figure is the US CMS Management Board. Here there are some changes. The board has both elected and appointed positions. Appointed positions are shown as shaded (blue). On the management side, the Project Manager/Spokesperson is proposed by the US CMS Collaboration, and then appointed by DOE and NSF. The level 2 project managers are suggested by the respective Institution Board and thence appointed by the Project Manager. The project office is totally appointed by the Project Manager. The US CMS Collaboration Board chair is elected, as are those representatives of areas vital to US CMS but "off project" (Education, Physics and Software/Computing). Finally, in a mirror to CMS, each project subsystem, except the Common Projects, has an Institution Board Chair, elected by the respective Subsystem Institution Board. Thus the US CMS Management Board is a mix of elected positions and appointed positions. What is new is that the Project Manager and the level 2 managers are appointed. For EMU, HCAL, and TRIDAS the level 2 managers were appointed by CMS anyway. I had also previously asked Dick Loveless to act as level 2 manager for Common Projects. Therefore the main change, beyond the Project Manager appointment, is the appointed level 2 managers for ECAL and Tracking. There is retained a healthy mixture of appointments and elections, including elected representatives of each subsystem.

The third figure indicates authorization, funding, and reporting. There are changes from our previous Project Management Plan. However, the basic principles that US CMS groups receive their funds directly from the agencies and that the US CMS Project Manager reports directly to the agencies and not the FNAL directorate are retained and will be retained in any acceptable plan. The main change is to make explicit the role of FNAL. The role of the Project Manager is unchanged - to define the distribution of funds, with the advice of the Management Board, to be sent to the individual groups and to track and report progress to the funding agencies. What is new is that FNAL will define a Project Management Group. The Project Management Group is charged by the funding agencies to be an "independent auditor" of the progress of US CMS. The funding agencies do not have a mechanism to do this, and have devolved it to FNAL. Thus we report to the Project Management Group and it reports also, independently, to the funding agencies. In this way the agencies get an independent review of how US CMS is doing as a cross-check. By the way, the Project Management Group will allow us to do "change control" and contingency assignment in a timely way, since these issues will come up on a shorter than annual schedule. Thus, the Project Management Group can even be a useful enabling tool of good management.

These 3 figures will form the basis of my presentation to HEPAP on March 14. As always, I am interested in your response to our attempts to get US CMS launched as a project in FY98.