Reallocation of staff, creation of an office for infrastructure and logistics and abolition of TAS
NOTE TO THE ATTENTION OF MR V. ŠUCHA – DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE JRC
Subject: R&D's view about reallocation of staff, support functions, alignment to Commission practices and simplification of procedures
Dear Mr Šucha,
We wish to thank you for your prompt and open reply to our letter last week, and we take up your offer to continue our interaction with you.
We recognise some efforts to provide staff with practical guidance on the new organisational chart and their potential role in it have been made through the introduction of a Career Guidance Support Network.
On this specific issue, we have noticed that the concept of the "Mobility Space", despite being cited in the JRC strategy, is no longer mentioned in your most recent communications. The alternative approach based on a Career Guidance Support Network implies that the responsibility to help colleagues in finding their role in the new structure rests exclusively with JRC management, with no involvement of staff representatives. This approach is consistent with the current poor practice at Ispra and Seville, where the Mobility Committee is in a state of stasis, last meeting two years ago. We believe that your decision to abandon any reference to the Mobility Space for the current transition to the new JRC structure is largely due to the difficulties faced to start the promised pilot phase and the barriers that are transforming what should be such a simple-to-implement project into a nearly impossible endeavour. We share your frustration, since we all know that the future perception of the Mobility Space will highly depend on the time of its introduction: if it is used to assist in the implementation of the reorganisation in a positive way, it will truly become a useful tool to match the institutional needs with the ambitions of the staff, whereas if it will be brought in at a later stage only to deal with "difficult cases", it will be viewed with due suspicion by staff.
In the meantime, we have noticed that the Commission has recently published on MyIntracomm a call for the expression of interest to ADs in DGs AGRI, DGT, EAC, GROW and SCIC to deal with the readjustment of staff levels across several DGs by means of voluntary mobility. This is an open and transparent process that, mutatis mutandis, could serve as an example for an internal JRC call dealing with our reorganisation, for as long as the Mobility Space is not available. This call could be launched as soon as the new organisational chart is approved, and before decisions affecting individual staff may be taken in a possibly less transparent way.
We also wish to come back to our earlier proposal regarding the "Resources" Directorate. We understand and fully agree with you that the future of the JRC is best protected by keeping it in line with Commission practice wherever possible. We also appreciate that it may be difficult to make any further significant change to the organisational chart at this stage of the approval process. Nevertheless, we wish to more clearly lay out our vision regarding the progression of the support function.
The current foreseen Directorate "R" contains elements belonging to traditional areas of competence also common to other DGs, as well as specific competences not managed by a typical DG in the rest of the Commission. In order to better follow the management structure of other DGs we propose that a more comprehensive name for Directorate "A" would be "Strategy, Resources and Coordination". Indeed it already has a "Resource Planning" function which could be further strengthened by putting the "Budget & Accounting" function also under the logical control of the same Directorate. "Human Resources" is already envisaged to become attached to DG HR in the near future, and following the same logic we believe that Corporate "ICT" could also eventually become part of DG DIGIT.
In order to fully adhere to your ambition of keeping the JRC in line with Commission practice wherever possible, all the remaining elements dealing with conventional JRC infrastructure and logistics could then become part of an Office, either OIB or a newly established one. This would reflect the current situation in Brussels and Luxembourg, where infrastructure is managed by independent offices and not by individual DGs, and it would comply with the recommendations contained in the document "Synergies and Efficiencies in the Commission - New Ways of Working" recently published on MyIntracomm. This document states that "where appropriate, making more use of Offices such as the PMO, the OIB/OIL, EPSO, or the European School of Administration can be examined. This will not only reduce the cost of support functions, but also provide better career opportunities for contract agents." Such a change would be expected to provide required efficiency gains for the JRC. Furthermore, we have always been concerned about the precarious situation of many temporary staff working at the JRC, and the full re-alignment of the JRC to Commission practice would offer the opportunity to resolve this situation through the conversion to open-ended CA 3a contracts for many current staff.
Additionally, infrastructure management by an Office could facilitate other DGs to locate some knowledge intensive activities, either temporarily or permanently, at JRC sites, reinforcing the sites themselves and boosting collaboration between the JRC and partner DGs. The proposed new organisational chart does indeed move in the right direction in that it envisages a central management of JRC support functions. We therefore see it as an intermediate step setting the framework to be followed by further moves towards the structure we have proposed above.
Lastly, we are pleased with your agreement that we must strive to improve our efficiency by analysing support processes and administrative procedures, and we share your disappointment for past difficulties encountered in realizing improvements. Nevertheless, action in this respect is now more urgent than ever, given a Commission mantra of having to do more with less. In order to send a clear signal to staff about your common sense commitment to simplification, we invite you to act to abolish the TAS (Time Accounting System): at the end of the year it always miraculously mirrors the staff allocation planned at the beginning, without contributing in any way neither to project management nor to common sense.
Robert Kenny
R&D Ispra
(signed)
Paola Di Pietrogiacomo
R&D Seville
(signed)
Cristiano Sebastiani
R&D Brussels
(signed)
Cc: Ms M.Rute
Mr J.P. Gammel
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TAS is, as its name suggests, an accounting tool and not an instrument used to allocate more or less resources to Directorates. As for matching the planned allocation at the end of the year there's no miracle: "only" 100% of a person's time can be declared in TAS, therefore if 100 persons declare their time (at 100%, no other option possible),at the end of the year you will have 100 persons as a result.
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