Coaching of EU-funded projects
Free resources to help you write an application and manage your project
Below you find a short description of tools that we either developed ourselves or adapted from EU provided templates and found helpful for either preparing an EU research application or managing an EU funded project.
Detailed explanations on how to use the files provided can be found in our book ☛ Navigating an EU Research Project: Managing Challanges to Deliver Success (Management for Professionals)
The files offered here will be kept updated according to the changing requirements of current EU Research calls. Therefore, they may differ in some details to the descriptions given in the book.
Project Card
The “Project Card” allows to develop a short introduction on your project idea, it covers the following points:
- Existing partners
- Call Reference
- Project idea
- Background & Approach
- Project Objectives
- Expected Outcome
- Work Packages
- Innovation
- Impact
- Benefits
- Main products
- Dissemination
- Project Duration
- Deadline for the application
- Expected Funding
- Author/Reviser
The idea is to always have only very short sentences for each bullet point and the whole Project Card ideally covers just 2 pages DIN A4.
During the proposal writing phase, the Project Card could be used to address additional partners to join the consortium or win interested parties to sign a Letter of Intent to cooperate with the proposed project as pilot user once the solution has been developed.
Once the project has been funded, the Project Card can easily be adjusted to serve an initial dissemination paper.
Resource Matrix Template
A set of interlinked XLS based tables that allow you to plan you labour resources in detail, calculate your costs and develop the Project GANTT.
With some small changes, each partner can transform the labour planning table to map their own resource spending against the original task allocation. This will facilitate the financial reporting to the programme office.
Potential Risks Table
The Potential Risks Table will be asked for in most application forms to evaluate how the consortium is prepared consider and address future challenges to the project’s performance. Our template table already offers some “standard” risks and answer on how to react on them, such as e.g. loss of productivity due to communication breaks or lack of pilot user cooperation due to their status of not being bound by a contract to the funding programme.
Dissemination Table
Our Dissemination Table is based on tables requested by some of the current programmes and gives a few examples of what can be reported and how.
Business Matrix Canvas - example for HEI
Many programmes expect the project to develop a post-project dissemination and exploitation plan. This is especially hard for non-profit organisation or pure research institutions, since they normally do not develop any business plans.
Our template gives an example of how Business Matrix Canvas could look like for a university.
QARR - Quarterly Achievements & Risk Report
This template is the updated version of the Quarterly Progress Report as described in the book “Navigating an EU Research Project”. The changes are based on the fact that from 2025 onwards nearly all EU Research Projects will be based on the Lump Sum Funding approach where your report your progress against objectives described in the proposal instead of reporting on how you spent your agreed on resources. It is set up in a way that together with the quarterly TimeSheet it fulfils all internal reporting needs for project control as well as delivering the needed data to fill in the quantitative parts of the formal Interim and Final Report each project has to deliver.
TimeSheet
The TimeSheet has to filled out for each person working in an EU Research Project to track the personnel resources used for each activity and compare this to the agreed-on funding.
The template still tracks both time and costs since some programmes still demand both.
Once this changes the template will be updated.