Grant Negotiations—Make sure everybody is on the NEF

I am still reading up on the documents, and boy are there a lot of information to dwell on. But I understand that I can't just read, I have to do some actions as well. Today I have basically done three things (in addition to more reading):

• I had a meeting with the NCP for Legal and Financial issues. The national research council has established a system with a lot of different contact persons for the various topics. I have used their competence already in the proposal phase, but now I got directly in touch with the one that know more about the grant negotiations, consortium agreements, handling of IPR and so forth. We talked through the major parts of the negotiations, and discussed some of the main things. For instance, he advised us on who will need to go to Brussels. His advice was that the coordinator goes with supporting personnel from the host institution; most of the technical and formal parts of the negotiations takes place in NEF anyway. He also commented on issues like sub-contracting, the number of milestones and deliverables (to keep the number low if possible), as well as counting the project officer as a best friend, we're in to this together. Very useful meeting.
• I communicated with the consortium, to make sure that all of them can access NEF. As a start I asked them to fill in information about authorised persons of their institution, just to get them to know the system and make sure that they have proper access.
• I have start looking at the templates for the annex 1 - the new version of Description of Work that we need to transform the proposal to. Some sections can be just copied over, some sections should be edited, and some new stuff must be added. And we need to address the concerns raised in the evaluation of the project. It seems like the template is fairly similar to the proposal when it comes to layout and typography, so it should be straight forward to use the same LaTeX template, I think. Which should make it very simple to move over the sections that doesn't need to be changed. 

All of this was useful, most of it takes a lot of time. And tomorrow I have to keep pushing forward. One of the things I need to take care of tomorrow is travel arrangements to Brussels.  And of course keep working on the DoW.