Director's Corner

12 January 2006

Barry Barish

Design Cost Board
At Frascati, I created three boards that will become the centerpiece of the GDE organization as we now move forward from having determined the baseline for the ILC towards doing the technical design for a construction project. Today, I want to introduce the new GDE Design Cost Board (DCB) that will be chaired by Peter Garbincius of Fermilab.

Ewan Paterson

The other members of this important board include: Wilhelm Bialowons (DESY), Jean-Pierre Delahaye (CERN), Atsushi Enomoto (KEK), Bob Kephart (Fermilab), Olivier Napoly (CEA-Saclay), Ewan Paterson (SLAC), Nan Phinney (SLAC), Tetsuo Shidara (KEK) and Nobuhiro Terunuma (KEK).

The immediate tasks for the DCB are directed toward producing a Reference Design Report (RDR) by the end of this calendar year, and the board's mission as I defined it at the Frascati GDE meeting is the following:

The Design / Cost Board will be responsible for assessing and providing guidance for the overall RDR design effort program. The DCB initial goals will be to propose the overall structure and content for the RDR document to be developed by the end of 2006. It also will provide early guidance required to enable the design / cost effort to get fully underway by the time of the Bangalore GDE meeting.

The DCB will set goals and milestones for producing the RDR, conduct design reviews and provide guidance and assessments of the RDR effort. The DCB will report to the Director and EC regularly as the design / cost effort progresses, reporting on early evaluations of costs, problems and changes needed in the BCD, etc.

There is no precedent that I know of for using a Design Cost Board in such a role and having such responsibility in the design of a large-scale project. The board is serving in one sense as the 'project manager.' But because we do not yet have a project manager, it is serving in another sense as the review board for the technical design and costing efforts. In a third sense it is constituted to ensure that the project is developed such that the design is done internationally and can be used in the different regions of the world.

This is quite a challenge! The board is already busy working with the area group leaders on setting design milestones and reviews, picking project management tools, and it is beginning the process of determining the content of the RDR.. Peter Garbincius met with the GDE Executive Committee just last week at our weekly telecon and discussed the short term plans for the DCB. In his words, "the immediate plan is to 1) get organized, 2) determine scope, depth, level of detail for RDR, 3) get requirements from Area System Groups, 4) set up series of reviews for each Area System, and 5) develop realistic schedule for producing RDR."

It is rather obvious that our Design / Cost Board will have its hands full! I will report on its progress, periodically.