April 2026

By: Alessandro Variola, Ghada Mahmoud, Romano Meijer, Yuliya Hoika

The ETO Project Office is one of the departments of the Einstein Telescope Organisation. It provides key project management frameworks, including systems engineering, costing, and risk assessment – all essential for turning the Einstein Telescope from a scientific vision into reality. Head of the Project Office Alessandro Variola, risk manager Ghada Mahmoud, and systems engineer Romano Meijer offer a glimpse behind the scenes of this department.

From left to right: Romano Meijer, Alessandro Variola, Ghada Mahmoud

For people who may not know the department very well – what does the Project Office actually do?

Alessandro: “The role of the Project Office is to help ensure that the future research infrastructure is built in line with the project baseline, while respecting requirements, schedule, and budget. In practice, this means structuring and managing planning, budget, and baseline configuration, while implementing quality, systems engineering, and risk analysis processes.”

And what does that mean in practice, from your different perspectives?

Ghada: “From a risk management perspective, our role is to identify, structure, and assess uncertainties in a way that supports decisions across the project lifecycle. This goes beyond keeping a risk register: we link risks to requirements, system architecture, cost, and schedule. We are also moving toward more quantitative approaches, especially in early phases like for the geometry comparison, to clarify uncertainties and support better-informed decisions.”

Romano: “In systems engineering and configuration management, particular attention is given to the soundness of the baseline configuration of the machine and infrastructure. First, we define what the machine must do by writing down its requirements. From these, we derive the system architecture, linking machine blocks to the requirements and modelling the interfaces between them. This helps us understand why the system is built a certain way and trace the impact of changes.

Finally, because the design goes through many iterations, everyone must work from the same agreed-upon information. In other words, we always need to know which version of the machine we are discussing. Advanced tools studied within the ET Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) framework support this by improving access to information and visualising these connections.”

What does the department look like today?

Alessandro: “The Project Office currently brings together 14 people, although they do not all work full-time, so the total FTE is less than 7. The team includes physicists, engineers with different specialisations, and a technical project manager. Together, they support the project through a combination of technical, organisational, and project-management expertise.”

What does the team look like today?

Alessandro: “We are spread across several countries and institutes: INFN sections in Rome, Turin, Genoa, Padua, and Perugia; CNRS laboratories in Paris, Orsay, and Lyon; and Nikhef in Amsterdam.”

Since you are working across several locations, how do you keep things running smoothly together?

Ghada: “Daily contact is maintained through videoconferencing and shared digital platforms such as Teams and EDMS. At the same time, in-person workshops and meetings remain important for aligning work across teams and disciplines.”

Looking back at the past year, what are you most proud of?

Ghada: “I am proud of the progress in integrating risk management into broader project activities. We are moving from risk management as a separate exercise towards something connected to system design, requirements, cost, and schedule. This makes risk information more useful and actionable. It is also encouraging to see risk management being used increasingly to support decisions, for example in the Task Force that worked on the baseline design last year and for the work on the Geometry Comparison Report.”

Romano: “For me, the Task Force work has been a real highlight. It resulted in a partial but solid baseline, with requirements, system architecture, and design rationale better traced and version-controlled than before. It also led to subsystem designs being developed in a more connected way, which has improved how we track interfaces. More broadly, it showed that ET can work effectively as an integrated team in project mode. The challenge now is to make that sustainable.”

Alessandro: “One result I am particularly proud of is the work around the first version of the Project Breakdown Structure (PBS) and the proposal for a new version. It has supported major efforts in configuration management, risk assessment, requirements definition, and scheduling, and it also helped the Project Office technical coordinator lead the Design Task Force in defining the baseline configuration.”

What is the main priority for the next six months?

Romano: “Two key priorities for systems engineering are developing MBSE methods and tools with the Institute for Machine elements and Systems Engineering (IMSE) at RWTH Aachen University, and creating version control processes with CERN’s Accelerator Coordination and Integration (ACE) group. The first should gradually improve ET’s data availability, while the second will provide a tool-independent framework for version control throughout the Einstein Telescope’s ongoing development.”

Ghada: “Over the next six months, risk management will focus on supporting the geometry comparison through a clear, consistent view of risks across scenarios. This will help compare the triangle and 2L configurations in terms of performance, cost, and schedule, and show decision-makers the key uncertainties. In parallel, we will keep strengthening links between risk, systems engineering, cost, and schedule, while moving toward more quantitative methods.”