Page History

2. Work expectations in INS and Workflows

• Nestor Espinoza presented slides prepared by INS management. Main take-away points are: (a) Cross-communication is key. If you are being stretched too thin, talk to your Working Group (WG) leads and Branch Managers. It is their job to figure it out! (b) The way in which time budgeting and allocation work for a WG goes as follows: (1) WG defines the labor budget, (2) WG leads request time to fulfill these labor request to instrument branches, (3) branch managers decide on how much they can allocate to the WG tasks (they are the key stakeholders in control of the resources). (c) The Mission Office (MO) is the "ultimate" key stakeholder — they control the budget and set the priorities. So, if something cannot be resolved between WG leads and Branch managers, or new critical tasks are identified by any of them (or the Division Office (DO) or MO), the MO is the one that should help figure a solution out together with them.
  
  
• Nikolay Nikolov poses the question of how all of this is weighted against deadlines. For instance, if a critical task needs X hours to get done, it is very different in terms of usage of time if they are done in 1 week or 1 month. Nestor Espinoza answers that, in principle, these plans should be outlined by both the WG leads and branch managers, and they should discuss priorities for different months and how the time should be spread on different tasks as to not stretch people too thin before the final allocation of resources is made. There is always room for re-definitions, but again, that's something that has to be discussed between branch managers and WG leads — leads, with input from the WG members as well — communication is key!
  
  
• Sarah Kendrew mentions that this is a very useful layout of how WG's works, and commenting on Nikolov's question, she does believe that this still will happen inevitably in the future. However, given now there is a clear depiction of how the WG/Branch/DO/MO relationship works, it is easier to resolve these problems. 
  
  
• Tony Keyes notes that this brings a lot of responsibility on each member as well. If members don't communicate with WG leads and/or Branch Managers, this will undoubtedly lead to problems, either in tasks not getting done or too much pressure on members.
  
  
• Brian Brooks raises the question about what happens when tasks not listed on the FY budget plan are identified and completed (e.g., tasks that appeared and were critical to get done during the FY). Nestor Espinoza answers that, in theory (and according to the current picture of how WGs work) that shouldn't happen: if a critical task is identified either by a member and/or by the WG lead, it is the job of the leads to reach out to branch managers about this, estimate the FTE required to get that done, and then the managers are the ones that decide if and when to allocate those resources to finish the task. Ultimately, if there is no consensus on this (e.g., branch managers decide this is not critical so will not allocate resources), the issue can be raised to the MO and thus be resolved between them, the branch managers and the WG leads.

• Nestor Espinoza reminds everyone to finish up updating the Pipeline testing tracking sheet. Still time to do this until September 20. He reports on the status of NIRISS pipeline testing. Basically all done; tickets written on ramp-fitting (

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1667

   — based on a problem also spotted by Nikolay Nikolov), and on outlier detection (

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1655

  ,

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1654

  , 

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1647

  ).
• Nikolay Nikolov reports on the status of pipeline testing for NIRCam. Imaging and spectroscopic modes done as well; various tickets reported (see, e.g.,

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1478

  ,

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1478

  , 

  Jira
  server STScI JIRA serverId aac911eb-9c55-3f14-8368-77b436fb6dc2 key JP-1469

  ). Currently working on getting the reference file for the extract1d step to be added to the pipeline (JP-1478).
• Sarah Kendrew reports on MIRI pipeline. Still some work to be done, but made great progress. Already submitted some validation notebooks to the JWST Pipeline Validation Github repo. Nestor Espinoza takes this chance to remind everyone that, if folks have notebooks to share, it would be ideal (although not mandatory) to submit them to that repo. Sarah Kendrew notes that, ultimately, this is to save yourself some time in case pipeline testing happens again in the future. She also mentions that it is very useful for the CalWebb WG if you comment on Jira that you tested a step — Nestor Espinoza has already made some of this work, but it would be good for everyone to double check this.
  
  
• Tony Keyes reports that he has still not updated the tracking sheet, but he will be doing this in the next few weeks.
• Nestor Espinoza congratulates everyone on their efforts on pipeline testing. Everyone has not only done an amazing job, but we have collectively learned a lot about TSOs (and the pipeline of course) thanks to this joint exercise!

Nestor Espinoza mentions that we are approaching the end of FY2020, which has been great for the TSO WG in general, pushing several high-priority tasks forward, and responding to the institute efficiently on its TSO needs — congratulations and hats off to everyone once again!

However, there are still some details to cover before we cross all tasks from the FY2020 TSO WG plan. In particular, tasks:

• Simulated data status (3.1)
• Comissioning plans (3.3)
• MIRI-related tasks (4.1)
• NIRSpec tasks (4.2)
• DMS tasks (4.3)
• JDocs tasks (4.4)
• JWST QL (4.6)

Need a little extra push to get done. For time's sake, he'll be contacting everyone during the week on the work left to do on these tasks.

Nestor Espinoza reminds everyone that the end of FY2020 also means the start of FY2021 — he'll be soliciting feedback for tasks to be performed by the TSO WG during the month while planning the FY2021 budget together with Sarah Kendrew.