Lessons learned from a multicountry collaborative and innovative project
Allow me to tell you what yesterday meant to me. I’m allowed to be excited and amussed by the thrilling drive of showing up to the milestone that gives clousure to a three and half years project.
Life is made up of little moments like this. Things you work for in order to get somewhere. You design, you plan, you execute and then you evaluate what happened in the way. Project management is embeded in our lives, whether we write books, plays, scripts, reports, processes or posts. It’s all there somewhere, in the way you structure the big picture, and how that’s been transformed into your daily routine. If there’s a well planned strategy then the those projects, the expected outcomes and the teams and tasks to deliver them will also be clearly established and defined.
A EU project has all of that embeded. And it’s a well structure mechanism to kickstart some actions and incentives through policy, by enabling stakeholders from society to show up to calls in which they propose a robust project plan that fits in a 40 page document to execute some resources, work packages, outcomes, impact, budgets and results. It’s all there from the very beginning, as a framework, and it’s evaluated and assed all the way to the end.
So let’s get right down with the good stuff: the nine lessons learned from my first final review of a EU project:
- One project officer and three reviewers.
- A whole day for the project with a full agenda from 9 to 17
- Online review vs in person review.
- Presenting results
- Preparing for an act
- Feedback from reviewers
- Waiting for a final response
- Celebrating a milestone
- The life after a EU project
- The persons and the institutions
- The collaborative energy of cohesive team
And in another post I’ll explain the lessons learned from actively participating in the creation of a community of practice.