Gemini without the UK

Well, I guess it’s more or less official now. The UK appears to be pulling out of Gemini at the end of 2012. The more or less final announcement can be found on the the STFC web site, here (scroll down to Attachment A and look at projects to be funded: Gemini (until end 2012)). That combined with the recent Gemini Board announcements make it pretty clear – Gemini will be operating without the UK come 2013.

Besides the expertise and history Gemini loses with the UK’s departure, it is set to lose 25% of its funding as well. While a new partner may be found, Gemini will have to prepare a plan and budget to proceed with 25% less starting 2013. The question is now, what’s the best way to do that. The Gemini Board Resolution 2009.B.17 instructs the observatory to prepare an operations with a 7-10% reduction in funding phased into place during the period 2011-2013. Presumably, that effort is meant to be a head start in case no additional partner is found and the observatory is forced to accept a 25% reduction in 2013.

Starting the austerity measures now seems a reasonably prudent thing to do, but is it really? What is the best way to operate and plan in this new environment? How can Gemini best position itself to not only survive the coming lean years, but thrive and prosper again when they’re over? The conservative approach, and one that greatly reduces the risk of forced layoffs – which is not a bad thing indeed, is to cut now so we can cut less later.

One might also, however, consider ways to use our current full funding to its maximum advantage to prepare us to best take the 25% hit later, if indeed we have to. Can we prepare ourselves better to take a 25% hit in 3 years by spending all our budget now? Or is it better to prepare for a 15% cut in three years, by saving up money by taking a 10% cut now? To answer these questions, I think we have to look at my earlier question – what is the best way to set Gemini up to prosper after this is all over?

First, we have to clearly find ways to be more efficient. Gemini’s three largest expenses (in order, I believe) are salaries, electricity, and travel. We clearly can’t make cuts in the 10-25% range without reducing the salary expense.  So, we need to learn to operate with fewer people.  One way to reach this goal is to concentrate our efforts until 2013 on improving efficiency.   Gemini has a history of trying to do too many things – so many that there was a time when everyone knew their projects wouldn’t all get done so they  just did  either what they wanted to most, or whatever they got bugged about most.  We now have a very comprehensive observatory project planning process that helps us produce a yearly work plan that has projects that are well-discussed and resourced so that the projects we approve are matched by the resources we have.  Our resource-balancing is not yet perfect, but the part of the process I want to review here is the selection of projects.

Each division determines what it considers its “Operations and Maintenance (O&M)” projects and these projects are then resourced and inserted first into the observatory-wide plan.   With the remaining available resources, new projects can be proposed by either the division with the resources, or often by other divisions who need cross-divisional resources for their projects.  Each division prioritizes their own projects in rank order.  Through discussions and negotiations between divisions, all the observatory projects are merged together until our most used resources start to fill up.

This process works pretty well on the surface, but in a time of dwindling resources, there are (at least) two major shortcomings in it.  1) As an group of very dedicated and ambitious people, the new projects proposed tend to be an expansion of our current capabilities, not a tidying-up of something we currently do, but perhaps not as efficiently or as completely as we could.  And 2), the O&M activities do not really get reviewed outside of each division, if then.  There is no opportunity to look at what we are doing now and ask ourselves if should really continue to do them.

In a time of dwindling resources, I think Gemini needs to work hard to address both of these shortcomings, starting with our recently-approved (but before the UK announcement) 2010 plan.  We need to first look at our new projects and ask ourselves if at the end of the year, we will be more efficient than at the beginning.  It’s time to stop trying to do everything and start perfecting what we do, so we can do it later with fewer resources.  A quarter FTE we save by a project this year, is a quarter FTE we have available EVERY year hereafter for additional projects.  Spending some time now to make sure we can perform our current operations with fewer FTEs in the future will put us in good shape to survive our coming decline in available staff.

The type of project planning we wish to avoid!

Second, we need to review what we are doing now, especially that which we consider O&M, our un-questioned set of annual tasks and allocated resources.  Everybody would like to do more for less, but that’s not usually possible without a concerted effort leading up to it.  There must certainly be things we do now that consume a lot of resources for little gain – at least compared to other projects that use the same amount of resources. We are going to have to cut what we are doing somehow, so best to take a close look now and work on eliminating high-effort, low-reward tasks.  In reality, there won’t be a whole lot of low-hanging fruit here, so this process will take some time and careful analysis.  But again, time spent re-evaluating what we do (and how we do it) that saves time later, will pay off ever after.  Completing these two tasks successfully will not only help us survive the coming downturn, but come out at the end (hopefully with a new partner or two in tow) ready to turn it back on and do some really exciting things.

So, linking this discussion back to reducing salaries, I’m still in a bit of a quandary. In one version of a perfect world, we would be fully-staffed now, no one would leave, and as we work our system and find ways to operate with fewer FTEs, we get rid of people, hence salary, and work our way down to our coming decreased operating budget.  In another perfect world, we would look at the resources we need in order to make ourselves more efficient and hire them now, perhaps releasing them, and the FTEs they reduced, at the end.  Reality, though, doesn’t work either of these ways: we have currently-open positions, people will leave on their own accord, and it’s inefficient (let alone a bit disconcerting) to hire people knowing they’re going to have be let go in two years or less.  I imagine, though, once we go through our O&M tasks and have some ideas of the gains (or reductions, really) to be made there, and have exchanged our new-capability 2010 projects for efficiency-improvement projects, we’ll have a pretty good idea of where the FTE-load improvements will be made, and can thus plan our hiring and redundancies accordingly. If we know the effort required in one area of the Observatory will be less at the end of our efficiency improvements, we know some positions we may not need to fill when a vacancy naturally occurs, for example.  We can also use this information to know what positions we want to make sure are filled and what positions we need to start cutting.  And we might find we need to increase one type of resource now, in order to complete our efficiency improvements for later.  It all starts, though, with re-evaluating our 2010 tasks and concentrating on efficiency improvements and exploring where we can get by with doing a little less with the least amount of impact.