RCUH Outstanding Employee of the Year Award

RCUH employees of the year 2002.

You may not know this, but JAC employees are not actually employees of the JAC at all — they are all employed by various management organizations. The Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii (RCUH) employs the vast majority of us, but a few are still employed by the partner agencies (PPARC, NWO and NRC). RCUH is attached to the University of Hawaii for administrative purposes, but is largely an independent, self-supporting entity whose mission is to enhance research, development, and training generally in Hawaii. It is now a large organization with over 1800 employees employed in all manner of research projects throughout Hawaii. Every year RCUH invites nominations for the Outstanding Employee of the Year award and a panel of 5 judges selects which employee has made the most demonstrable, significant, and outstanding performance, contribution, or achievement to his/her project. JAC is proud of its record in this award, having had two previous winners in the past 15 years.

This year the award went jointly to Frossie Economou and Tim Jenness from the JAC. Tim and Frossie were project manager and chief technical lead of the JAC Observation Management Project - a project that has been responsible for automating nearly all of the key processes at the heart of the JAC production of Science Data. This was been released on both the JCMT and UKIRT and their independent communities during Semester 2002B.

Since few people fully appreciate the significance of these changes (it is "only software", after all), very few realized (or realize) the difficulty of what they have had to do. In changing our business processes they have had to interact with our entire user community (four countries) plus our local operations (two telescopes, with very different corporate cultures up to now), and keep all these interested parties happy, whilst also changing, fundamentally, the way we work. The only way they managed to complete the project successfully was through their tremendous knowledge, understanding, dedication and drive. Since they were trying to change the way people work, they naturally met resistance, and Frossie spent a large amount of time just seeking out people who were willing to contribute and support the project in some key areas. Without this input from a cross section of users the project could not meet its goals.

Tim had to cope with a conflicting set of user requirements from the two different communities and has had to merge them into a single coherent design. They then had to distill this design into sub-systems individual software engineers could produce, and motivate their team into delivering a great product on time and on budget. The release of the software spanned a four-month period from July to October 2002 and both Frossie and Tim worked 14 hours a day, 7 days a week during the commissioning period. Frossie worked from 8am to 10pm and was present on the mountain to give the personal support. Tim worked from 2pm to 4am and worked in Hilo using the video conferencing system. The whole process was extended by the run of poor weather we had in early 2002B, and so the support had to be continued way beyond the two weeks initially scheduled until the systems were fully tested. All of this was, of course, extremely draining, and would have taken its toll on lesser individuals. However, throughout the period both Tim and Frossie maintained a positive attitude, dealing personally and calmly with all the new observers' fears and questions, and continuously improving the system as time went on.

Needless to say, the OMP has been an enormous success and Tim and Frossie's efforts were recognized at the RCUH Outstanding Employee of the Year award ceremonies in February. I am sure I echo everyone's sentiments in wishing them a hearty congratulations on a job well done!

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