What project management resources do I already have available?

The basic information and procedures for running the project are here:

• The Grant Agreement (GA) with Annex 1
• The Consortium Agreement (CA)
• The online information in the Participant Portal

These documents are the legal documents and the source and basis for managing your project. If in doubt always go back to the source. The contracts may be hard to read and extensive so ask for help in finding info you need. However, you should at least know the intensions of these contracts so that you run and manage your project in accordance with what is set out in the contracts.

The GA is a contract between the partners and the EC signed by the coordinator and acceded by the partners. The most important info in the GA concerns:

• Start date, duration of your project, budget and pre-payments
• Reporting of work and costs
• Eligible costs and payments
• Rights and obligations in relation to IPR
• Ethics, conflict of interest, confidentiality
• Every measures the EC can take against you if you do not fulfil your obligations

For Annex 1, aka Description of Work, (DoW) see XXX

The CA is a contract between the partners in the project. EC requires it but are not a part of it. If there are conflicts between the GA and CA texts the GA will prevail.

The CA describes:

• Procedures for managing the project
• The management structure (also in the Annex 1 of the GA)
• Payment arrangements between the partners
• Intellectual property rights (IPR);  background, rights to results and access to results and background
• Procedures for publication
• Conflict resolution and voting rights

The online information about your project is very useful and you will find much of what you need on-line in the Participant Portal. Use it and assure that all partners are aware of this source of information. This is the official and updated info so there is no need to duplicate and download it. It just will give you a lot of work in assuring that your copies are updated.

You will find in the Participant Portal:

• Timelines for reporting
• The GA and Annexes, amendments
• Partner info
• Budgets and payments per partner including pre-payments
• Start date and Reporting periods
• Work packages info
• Deliverables with status and due dates
• Milestones status
• Risk status
• Publication lists
• Costs reported

You will also do the periodic reporting, including cost reporting online from these systems.

The efforts spent on getting familiar with the somewhat “special” user interface of the Participant Portal is well worth its time.