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November 30, 2004 |
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ALMA Celebrates Silver Anniversary
Meeting of lab managers association focuses on management, networking |
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CELIA M. HENRY |
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People who become laboratory managers during the course of their careers usually find themselves having to learn about lab management on the job. The Analytical Laboratory Managers Association (ALMA) is an organization where new and experienced lab managers alike can be sure to meet others who face similar challenges. Last month, more than 100 attendees celebrated ALMA’s 25th anniversary at a meeting held at Agilent Technologies in Wilmington, Del.
The organization was started by Claude Lucchesi of Northwestern University and Thomas Lyttle, then at Iowa State University and now retired from Tulane University. Lucchesi remembers Lyttle “nosing around” the lab during a break from a workshop on nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry held at Northwestern in 1979 and noticing the “student-proofing” of instrumentation. Lucchesi recalls saying to Lyttle: “Hey, you must be a lab manager.”
As they continued their chat, it quickly became apparent that they shared many of the same experiences and could learn from one another. “After talking a while, we said we really ought to have a meeting on this,” Lucchesi says. “The next thing you knew we were planning to have a conference of laboratory managers.”
For the first meeting, they targeted managers of university laboratory facilities, but they quickly discovered that managers in industrial and government laboratories faced similar challenges. Managers in those organizations clamored to participate as well.
Originally called the University Laboratory Managers Association, the association soon changed its name to reflect the universality of the challenges faced by lab managers in all sectors.
“The management problems for the academic and industrial and government labs are all the same,” Lucchesi says. “We have staffing problems. We have motivational problems. We have instrumentation problems. We have equipment purchasing problems.”
The ALMA conference fills a niche not being served by other scientific meetings, Lyttle says. “Most other conferences are technically oriented. We’ve got the NMR conferences and the mass spec conferences. We need to go to those, and we need to learn from them, but that’s the technical side,” he says. “It’s the management side that didn’t seem to have anybody filling the needs. We’re all scientists. We never get any training in management. It’s just thrust upon us.”
Lyttle believes that the networking aspect of ALMA has been the key to the organization’s success. He remembers encountering a problem at Tulane after speaking with a woman at an ALMA conference who had had a similar problem. He called her to ask how she had dealt with the issue and was able to learn from her experience.
Lyttle’s one disappointment with ALMA is the current relative lack of academic participation. He believes that universities have different priorities. “They’ll fund you to attend a technical meeting,” he says, but the travel budget is too tight to allow attendance at other types of conferences.
The theme of the 25th anniversary meeting was “Operating the Analytical Lab as a Business & Measuring Its Performance.” In one presentation, Simon Wood of Labformatics Ltd. in the U.K. told attendees how to use a “balanced scorecard” to measure performance and guide improvement in the laboratory. The balanced scorecard, developed at the Harvard School of Business, is a management approach in which an organization is viewed from several perspectives with defined objectives. The key component of the balanced scorecard is a “strategy map,” which maps the objectives and cause-and-effect relationships within the different perspectives. During a roundtable discussion, participants got to try their hand at constructing a balanced scorecard and strategy map for an analytical services lab at a fictitious chemical company.
In another talk, Larry M. Ryan of the Corporate Center for Analytical Sciences (CCAS) at DuPont in Wilmington, described his organization’s experience in moving to a customer-driven model. CCAS started out as a facility that had a monopoly on internal customers, but like many industrial analytical services facilities, it found itself under increasing pressure to justify its existence. CCAS needed to provide competitive pricing or face its customers looking outside the company for analytical services. The resulting transformation has been so dramatic that CCAS launched a business providing analytical services to customers outside DuPont.
ALMA may have reached its silver anniversary, but the organization isn’t looking just to the past. At the meeting, John S. Sadowski of Air Products & Chemicals in Allentown, Pa., now past president, announced that the organization is putting together its vision for the next 25 years. ALMA is still a relatively small organization, with slightly more than 300 members. Sadowski would like to see the organization expand and the internationalization that is already happening accelerate. Meetings similar to the ones in the U.S. have been launched in Europe, Africa, and China.
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Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2004 |
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