Report on Oversight Committee Meeting, 03/07/07
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The WP issues raised included:
o A replacement VME crate for the beam tests is needed for FNAL. The OsC
  commented this could have a lead time of months so we should order it
  asap.
o They seemed concerned about the lack of the ECAL ASIC for WP2 Task 2.1
  even though this is a French chip and has little impact on the UK
  longer term.
o The OsC thought the WP4 glue studies should continue, even though
  they are nominally completed. They would like to see a thorough,
  in-depth study of long-term effects, aging, radiation hardness, etc,
  to prevent the issues which arose at the LHC. They want us to identify
  the key issues and come up with a plan; they want to be persuaded we
  have the expertise (although they freely acknowledge Manchester are
  the experts in this field).
o They are concerned about the MAPS signal/noise and what we will do to
  improve it if it does not come out as expected.
o The are concerned about the lack of tests of the ECAL (both in WP1
  and for the MAPS option in WP3) in a magnetic field. We said we would
  look into this although moving the beam test ECAL system into a
  magnet, even if we can find one which is usable, would be a major
  undertaking.
o The political situation w.r.t. the detector concepts becoming
  collaborations, LoIs and EDRs, etc, provoked a long discussion. We
  pointed out that this would definitely require more travel funds
  as we have to get more involved with the detector groups and that,
  as it was within WP5 already, it was not a change of scope (and so
  has no complications which that would imply). The OsC actually thought
  that concentrating the physics studies more on the detectors would be
  a good thing overall and hence agreed we should increase the level of
  travel for this, even if it eats into the working allowance. We
  guesstimated this would be at most 20k extra (compared to the WA
  of ~160k).

For the managerial aspects:
o There was an odd discussion on the financial tables. The STFC staff
  thought we had completed them incorrectly and we were heading for a
  significant overspend. The actual situation is more like an underspend
  and Mike was able to show them that they had misunderstood what had
  been done. However, we will probably be asked for yet more detail next
  time.
o We have crossed half-way through the grant period and will need to
  make a plan to completion for the next OsC meeting. This will mean
  supplying two sets of Gantt charts; one as usual and one with our best
  estimates of the actual schedule for the rest of the grant. We will
  need to revise the milestones for this as well, of course.
o We were asked to update the risk register for the next meeting as this
  is "looking old". We should retire some risks and the OsC thought
  there were likely to be new risks which we should have added by now.
  The extra travel cost for detector concept->collaboration studies is
  not listed, for example.
o Assuming we don't spend a significant fraction of the working
  allowance on cost overruns (which seems a reasonable assumption at
  present), then we discussed using the rest on prolonging the grant
  period. This requires the agreement of STFC Executive following a
  recommendation of the OsC but we gained the impression that it is
  likely to be forthcoming. This would allow us to e.g. extend an RA by
  a few months beyond Mar 2009 so as to finish things off cleanly. The
  critical thing is that we must be sure we will not need the WA for its
  original purpose before this can be agreed. They want to see an
  outline plan for this at the next OsC meeting. This implies we have to
  do a much more careful estimate of the budget status in terms of
  remaining costs before the next OsC meeting so that we can have a good
  idea about how much of the WA will be available for this.

The next meeting will be on Fri 25 Jan, 2008. The paperwork will need to
be submitted by Tue 18 Dec and we will be sent questions to reply to in
early January. We need to change the document we submit; they want less
on the status and more on how we will finish on time.
                              Mike and Paul