A coordinator’s duties are manifold, and one particular responsiblity is dedicated to reporting in it’s various forms. Communication, dissemination and exploitation plans of research results are integral parts of their workloads.
Above all, what’s about the people working in a particular project?
Consortium meeting — a mass of efforts, effects, and energy
Meetings in person are argued to be important for managing a project — they still are — and virtual meetings are integral part of untertakings — everyone knows.
Kick-off, telephone conferences, final meetings, webconferences, — everyone is happy when it’s done and no hazards have devastated the progress of the particular meeting. Reports are delivered by team leaders and approved by the consortium.
Finally, all the duties are done and in most cases there is one task less on the list.
Upfront the next meeting it takes enormous efforts and energy to pull and push people again together, as they have not been integrated in making progress, and lost in the middle of nowhere rebooting needs a lot of resources.
Project meeting — a unique resource for the consortium
During the meetings I was honoured to chair I learned to summarise assemblies jointly with the participants. I used a bundle of questions (similar to those used for The OIDA) and collected the anwers.
Sharing these answers at the meeting amongst the participants, and selecting important ones helped us to make the protocol (results, pictures, people, tasks, timeline, etc.), and prepare forthcoming workshops.
A particular experience …
… might illustrate to you the immense need to give persons their say.
During one of my doing-the-collection-at-the-end-of-a-meeting we gathered our answers in writing. Then we shared them by reading aloud. Out of nothing one colleague finally said, ‘I have been working here for almost 20 years, but no one ever has asked me about my tasks.’
Daratzdawutz, which is an unconscious sound of surprise.
Dear coordinator,
As time goes by and projects end a lot of work you will achieve:
reports and papers, joy and stress, sucesses, sometime corns of grief.
Who are those humans spent their time? Who are those we’s and I’s and thee’s,
who in the end would love to have variegated memories?
Above all responsibilites of a coordinator, task leader or work package leader the consortium members shall have their say, and the history of a project is becoming vivid.
This history is told and written down in a memory book, either as a Project Farewell or a Project Chronicle — a way of disseminating, communicating and exploitation of results.
XAIPE, SteVe.
Further reading
L. Duarte, N. T. Snyder, mastering virtual teams — Strategies, Tools, and Techniques That Succeed, 3rd Edition, 2006, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (for further customer reviews pls have a look at amazon.de or amazon.com).
In 2008 I started to exercise this book so to cope with telephone conferences and web meetings.
About me
I have been involved in various European projects in FP6, FP7, HORIZON 2020 / H2020 coping with different roles. From those experiences I developed The OIDA and memory books, the Project Farewell and the Project Chronicle.
Pictures
The pic Teeline-poem-coordinator has been taken by myself.
