A project management toolset for H2020 participants

We will soon start a new project and the project manager appointed in our organisation asked for a meeting to discuss the tasks and duties. One of the issues he was not sure about was the tools for monitoring the project activities as a partner organisation. What kind of templates do we use for internal monitoring and administration to make sure our part of the activities is well documented?

You may remember that we published a Coordinators’ Guide for H2020 projects a few years ago together with many templates for reporting, monitoring, etc. Our project manager knew these very well; he was rather wondering which ones to use out of these for internal purposes.

What we agreed on is the following:

First of all, there has to be a schedule for the planned activities and also a spending plan for personnel and other costs linked to these activities. We normally do the planning for the first 9 or 12 months internally. A simple table does the job. The project manager has to send it to the supervisor who makes sure that the financial people get a heads-up on the project spending.

All organisations in an H2020 project have the ’best effort’ obligation to disseminate and exploit the project results. Therefore, administering these activities is a basic requirement. In case there is no joint template for all partners, we use our own dissemination/exploitation template and fill it in each case when a major activity takes place.

All coordinators would provide their partner organisations with some kind of an internal reporting template (we also have one published) to follow more closely the activities done by all partners. These reports are normally filled in on a 6-monthly or 9-monthly basis. If this is not the case, we internally have to follow the project implementation, so we use a simple e-mail that is sent to the supervisor with a summary of the tasks completed, the linked costs, tasks ahead of us and any difficulties encountered. We do this on a quarterly basis. The supervisor then makes sure that the financial department is also informed about all relevant issues.

The project manager also has to follow the allocation of staff efforts to see if we deviate from the plans. For that, again a simple table is filled in (based on the timesheets) by work package or by task – choose the more relevant one:

These are the basics for internal monitoring. The rest comes from the coordinator or specifically because of the tasks we are responsible for. Let me know if you would use different tools or you faced any difficulties as a partner that these templates and tools would not have been helpful for – is there anything missing for you?