Design review R9: operations plan

[Casey Law]

R9: A more complete operations plan be formulated by both NRAO and the realfast team.

This plan should include the following areas:

• Daily operations. What is expected of EVLA operators, data analysists and support scientists. Both the tasks, and the estimated time for these tasks needs to be listed. If the realfast team will be involved in these daily tasks their roles and responsibilities must be included.
• Periodic maintenance. This includes tasks that need to be done on weekly, monthly or yearly timescales. It includes computer maintenance, operating system updates, replacing obsolete hardware, scheduled software updates and any software porting. It should be listed who is rrespnsible for these tasks. And time estimates for these tasks, over periods of say a year, need to be made.
• Problem solving. Bugs, hardware failures and other unexpected issues will occur. It’s hard to predict the how much time these will consume but an estimate should be made. The roles and responsibilities of the realfast team and the various groups within NRAO in resolving these issues should be outlined.
• Improvements. It’s an exciting project with a lot of potential. There is plenty of scope for continuing to improve the system beyond it’s currently funded lifetime. An outline of how improvements will be introduced, tested and commissioned is needed.
• Project termination. The expected lifetime of realfast is a consideration when designing it. And when it is time to decommission it how will that be done?