Project management is the most important part of every EU Project proposal. Not being able to perfectly manage your project means that, the project itself will most likely not get approved. There are many things to be taken under consideration, regarding the different parts of project management.
Using tools and services to manage your project, can save you a lot of time and of course a lot of effort. Tools will make this process easier for you. It will not be long before you are able to do this in an almost automated way.
A proper toolkit must be able to offer many different tools for managing your research projects. There should also be recommendations on general project management software and tools. They will must help your team manage all the different activities that need to take place. From writing the proposal all the way to implementing it.
A popular toolkit you can use!
One of the most popular tools you can use to manage your proposal is the Gantt Chart. It is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project’s schedule. This chart can help you organize and view all of your projects and their activities as well as any tasks against all pre-established timeframes. This chart can be used to also, track milestones and all the major progress of your research project. The Gantt Chart comes with different templates instructions and examples on how to use it.
Following this way of thinking, there are more tools that can be used in order to manage a scientific proposal. Project Charter is also very important for every proposal management. The purpose of this tool is to manage and define exactly what the Project team will be able to deliver and also define the resources that will be needed and justify them.
The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is the tool to organize the research project work into components that can be easily managed.
Moving on, we have the Communications Plan, a plan that facilitates the dissemination of the information to the research team member as well as all the major stakeholders of the project.
For perfectly defining the responsibilities to the entry, ownership, sharing, validation, editing, and storage of primary research data you can use the Data Management Plan (DMP).
Last but not least is the Issue Management tool that allows you to capture every single detail of any issue that might occur during the proposal writing or, later on, during the project implementation. That information can be given to the proposal team as it will be their job to fix the issues before they start causing trouble to the proposal or the implementation.
Simple tools like these can be very important for European research projects such us H2020. It is important to remember that, managing a research project is not an easy task. To do that on your own requires a lot of experience on the specific field. However, by using the right tools or find an external manager , you will be able to achieve the best results possible for your research projects, without worrying about not having the experience to do so. Make up your mind, choose your allies and do your best for your project!
