In order to adapt to the rapid changes in its environment and to meet the challenges of nuclear safety and radiation protection, the Institute has set itself targets in terms of performance, innovation and employer attractiveness. In 2022, buoyed by the end of the Covid-19 health crisis, the Institute boosted its transformation momentum within the framework of its 2030 Ambitions & Strategy project.
The digital transformation program, refocused on achieving digital success, helps craft changes in IRSN’s activities while sustaining its technological base for the long haul. Cataloging enables the Institute to capitalize more easily on its scientific and technical data.
New tools for strategic workforce planning contribute to developing IRSN’s attractiveness as an employer and to maintaining the skills necessary for performing its expert assessment and research missions, in a context of changing expectations and employee practices.
Developing digital tools for the internal sharing of IRSN’s assets and encouraging innovative collaboration methods such as communities of practices have triggered a shift towards a learning organization, while support for teams from IRSN Lab are inventing forms of value creating facilitation.
Lastly, IRSN is continuing its mission to build on its capital of knowledge and share the skills of its experts through the training it provides at IRSN Academy, its external training brand.
Certified since 2007, IRSN has obtained the renewal of its ISO 9001 certification for the next three years. The quality-based management system is a structuring tool for the Institute’s activities. Its scope now includes nuclear safety and radiation protection training by IRSN Academy. These were some of the strong points highlighted by AFNOR, the certification body: proper consideration of the needs and expectations of interested parties, the creation of communities of practices, and the commitment and professionalism of IRSN teams. There are four points of improvement to be addressed before the next audit, scheduled for 2023.
The goal of IRSN’s digital transformation strategy, launched in 2019, is to endow all IRSN employees with a high-performance hybrid and digital working environment. Following the publication in 2021 of IRSN’s digital strategy and given the acceleration of digital issues, both within the Institute’s environment and for its lines of business, it appeared necessary to update the procedures for implementing and managing the initial version of the digital transformation program.
Version 2.0, launched in 2022, is geared towards realizing concrete digital successes, assessed according to several criteria: stakeholder perception, technical success, operational performance, and strategic success. These successes are expected to contribute to the operational development of IRSN’s activities and to sustain its technological base.
The program is made up of 29 projects developed to contribute to the continuation and compliance of activities, to the prerequisites for transformation, and to strengthening the Institute’s positioning in its ecosystem. It incorporates a set of guiding principles for the direction and management of these projects, a budgetary commitment, and governance procedures.
The projects selected cover the fields of research, expertise, functionality, and digital commons. Examples include the redesign of the SISERI application (Information system for monitoring exposure to ionizing radiation), the PEPS jobs plan management project, the new version of the CRITER mapping website, published in 2011 by IRSN to report on the results linked to the Fukushima event, the website for centralizing radioactivity measurements in an emergency situation, and the future en.irsn.fr/EN site.
IRSN has implemented a first governance component for its data, as part of the rollout of its data use and optimization strategy, by compiling an inventory of the main scientific and technical data at its disposal. This indexed inventory is available in the data catalog, currently made up of more than 200 data records and accessible to all employees who complete and enrich it on an ongoing basis. An internal tool for sharing the existing data assets, this catalog makes it easier to identify any that are eligible for Open Data. It is also used to populate external catalogs such as the interministerial catalog of data or the environmental data of Green Data for Health, an initiative of the 4th National Health Environment Plan and to which the Institute regularly contributes.
With support from the Government as part of the France Relance program, IRSN launched the development of its Euratom Accounting Integration software in the Base for the Preparation of Reports on Safeguards (ICEBERG) in 2022. It aims to modernize, in terms of both functionalities and development technologies (programming language, operating systems, etc.), the processing of data relative to international accounting declarations for nuclear materials present in civil nuclear facilities in France. IRSN, which uses the accounting to support French authorities in the field of nuclear material non-proliferation, will have an optimized system for all its dedicated tools, thanks to ICEBERG. In particular, it will enable a data consolidation process to be set up and the associated tasks to be automated, such as the issuing of certain accounting reports that have so far been drawn up manually, the automatic verification of deliverables such as declarations, the recording of final reports, and long-term data storage. ICEBERG will also be equipped with comparison and query modules, enabling tedious analysis work to be automated.
ICEBERG will strengthen the Institute’s ability to respond quickly to any request for expertise and will provide national authorities and international bodies with a global overview of the accounting data assets on nuclear materials, traceability of declarations, and the long-term availability of this data.
SUPPORT PROVIDED TO
86
PROJECTS SINCE THE CREATION
OF IRSN LAB
719
EMPLOYEES TAKING PART IN AT LEAST ONE OF THE 141 SESSIONS, ORGANIZED FOR THE MOST PART REMOTELY
IRSN Lab: Providing support for 30 new projects
Launched in 2020, IRSN Lab is an innovation and creativity laboratory that allows Institute employees to test out new methods of finding solutions to organizational, scientific, technical and societal challenges. In 2022, support from IRSN Lab led to the emergence of two high value-creating forms of facilitation.
First, support for research teams that request help from IRSN Lab at key points in their research projects. The innovation lab has often helped research teams lay the foundations of their project roadmap. By bringing all the stakeholders together around a table, it has facilitated the co-construction of a project’s structural building blocks and the drafting of its overall organization. IRSN Lab has also supported teams whose project was already up and running, but who have reached a point in their research where they needed to step back and ask themselves where to go next. IRSN Lab has helped these teams to review the knowledge produced, questions left unanswered or new queries, identified obstacles and barriers, etc., in order to (re)prioritize their actions and the next steps in the research project.
Second, helping a team to define their needs when the time comes to launch a service. To start a service on a solid footing, clearly describing expectations is a fundamental step. IRSN Lab provides support in two stages. The first consists in running a “needs identification” session, provided for in the specifications and prepared in tandem with the service provider to fully understand the questions being asked. In the presence of the service provider, acting as observer, future users of the product explain their needs from different perspectives. This session can be completed by a workshop in “user test” mode at a time when the service provider has developed a prototype, mature but still modifiable, of its deliverable. Feedback and comments from future users allow the solution to be tweaked. These two support formats contribute to a significant increase in the efficiency of the service.
TRA-G (strategic workforce planning transformation) is a major cross-disciplinary project whose ambition is to maintain and develop skills within IRSN, in a context of evolving professional practices and changes to the internal and external environment. The project’s collaborative work, initiated in 2020, has mobilized a wide range of employees around the redesign of the strategic workforce planning tools, with several objectives in mind: retaining employees by providing a clear picture of what their jobs entail today and what they may become tomorrow, strengthening internal and external mobility and employability, increasing IRSN’s attractiveness as an employer, maintaining and developing skills, providing sound support, and promoting career development. In 2022, two new tools were rolled out:
To evolve towards a learning organization, IRSN is developing knowledge-sharing tools and supports innovative collaboration methods.
Thanks to the Ask search engine, currently indexed to more than 400,000 internal and external resources, all IRSN employees enjoy easy one-stop access to information and business knowledge (assessment documents, repositories, scientific works, databases, international documents, IRSN intranet, etc.). Approximately 500 employees use Ask each month for automated information searches that are increasingly relevant to business needs. They use Ask as a tool for accessing IRSN’s knowledge and sharing assets to enhance their expertise and research on a daily basis.
The communities of practices launched in 2021 to encourage skill-sharing and cross-functional exchanges within the Institute have shown considerable growth. Driven by dedicated facilitators and sponsors, 12 communities of practices, with at least 80 members each, have created learning spaces around a particular trade or profession, a subject of common interest, or an area of knowledge. Colleagues who did not know each other can now interact to improve their practices and optimize how IRSN works. A space for peer-to-peer learning and knowledge pooling the communities of practices create an environment of scientific and technical emulation in a climate of trust and mutual assistance. Through testing out innovative collaborative methods based on collective intelligence, they embody a new mindset and help in the transformation of the Institute.
TRAINEES TRAINED IN 32 SESSIONS
TRAINEES TRAINED IN 13 SESSIONS
IRSN Academy: providing excellent external training
In 2022, for its first year of practice, IRSN Academy trained more than 400 trainees in France and abroad: medical imaging professionals, occupational physicians, industrialists, nuclear safety or environmental engineers who participate in the prevention or control of risks related to ionizing radiation in the course of their jobs. IRSN launched “IRSN Academy”, its external training brand, in September 2021 with the goal of promoting safety and radiation protection. To this end, the Institute draws on the knowledge, skills and tools of its experts, who provide training in the fields of radiation protection, nuclear safety and security. In radiation protection, IRSN Academy’s catalog includes all level I, level II, medical sector and industrial sector PCR (radiation protection specialist) training. Its initial certification training modules, lasting 8.5 days/54 h or 12.5 days/84 h depending on the options, are particularly rich in content. They combine theoretical teaching with practical work: visits, exercises, role play, use of devices. As for nuclear safety training, it is focused on highly specialized approaches, sophisticated calculation codes and platforms, such as SOFIA and SYLVIA, which the Institute has developed as part of its research or expertise work. IRSN Academy’s catalog is regularly updated in line with developments in knowledge and regulations. Our ambition for 2023 is to maintain the high quality of these training courses – Qualiopi and OF PCR-certified by the Global Certification body – and to promote their excellence nationwide by means of targeted marketing.
