More Grant Negotiations, and then some

As mentioned earlier, this project-thing is now walk in the park. But the park is not a small one. And the paths to follow are long on winding. And the descriptions are not always accurate. So, the DoW go back and forth, again and again. And we mess things up on our end from time to time to. Like forgetting to submit changes in subversion, and ending up submitting a version with some important changes missing.

Be structured. Be calm. Be happy. always. And tweak again and again, based on the input you will get from Brussels. And in the end, you end up with a version that all parts agree on.

I think we may have reached that step today. So, maybe was it the final version we submitted in NEF just an hour ago.

The only thing that remains then is the consortium agreement.  The advise regarding discussions on CA is relax. Take it easy, and let the partners play it out - moderate, and consolidate, and in the end we have something that everyone agree on, but no one are exactly happy about.

And soon it is summer. With so many other things to learn!

Still preparing Grant Negotiations

For those who follow this tread, you may wonder what's going on here since updates are so sparse.

On 15. May we finished the first draft of the grant agreement preparation forms and the Annex-1 of the Description of Work (DoW) in NEF, and submitted this. We believed then that we looked forward to a few quiet days with Constitution Day in Norway, and some preparations for the meeting in Brussels. Little we knew about what Brussels had in the works for us.

Early the next day, 16. May, we received an email from the project officer, expressing his thanks for the draft we submitted on time in NEF. However, he had some concerns about who we planned to send to the negotiations. Basically, he wanted more people to show up, to cover all aspects of the proposal. That's fair, but we got this information late to be honest. Later the same day, we got another email detailing the agenda for the negotiations. What we discovered was that we (or the coordinator) are supposed to give a 20 - 30 minutes introductory presentation on the proposal. And there are comments in the text that make us believe that the content of this presentation will commit the consortium.

Basically, get to work: Get more people in on the negotiations, and start preparing material for the meeting. (And then do some hipp-hipp-hurra in between.)

Remember next time: The first day you are invited to grant negotiations, start working on a presentation that highlights the four or five most important objectives of the proposal and their expected impact. And be modest when doing so—there should not be promises beyond what's already stated in the proposal, because you will get trouble with your consortium if you do so. The presentation should also include what has been done in order to meet suggestions and comments pointed out in the ESR. If you are as lucky as us, with almost no comments in the ESR, that part should be easy. And get enough people to sign up for a trip to Brussels. It's much better have three extra persons drinking coffee and working out of a hotel in Brussels because they are not needed at the negotiations, than having the same people and three more somewhere else in Europe, unable to get to Brussels because schedules and flights were considered to late.

But remember to start this early. At the moment you are notified it is already too late.

Grant Negotiation preparations

As I took it on me to chronicle the Grant Negotiation process for a EC project, I have to keep writing. A week has passed by already since my previous post, and it's again Friday. What was accomplished during the last week, again?

First, we have planned and prepared the practicalities for travel to Brussels. The Coordinator of the project will of course travel together with me, and our finance manager will also join us. We try to put together a group of people that make us looking good (or at least credible), and then it is important to bring a few people who will be able to talk about important things (for the commission) in a reasonable way. I think we have a good group.

Regarding NEF, almost all partners have now confirmed their information on the portal, and I have entered all the work package descriptions and resource estimates into the form. It was easy, but the system was terribly slow. It is also sad to see all the nice formatting done in the proposal just disappear in the web forms, the typography possibilities in the forms are non-existent. It's not even possible to make something bold or emphasised, as far as I could tell. At least, the system was reliable. The most important thing was that it's not possible to add figures in the WP descriptions, and we had some in the proposal. Something to remember for the future, will save some rewriting.

One final thing regarding the NEF. The Deliverables and Milestones need some more descriptive text than we included in the proposal. For now we will just make it very simple in the draft, because we do not want to do more work than absolutely required on this. However, we should also try to make the project officer happy—I still work on finding the right balance between the two.

The Annex 1 of DoW was straight forward to create from the proposal. I have done a few minor tweaks to the LaTeX template, mostly concerning layout of Section headers and design of table of contents, to make it look as much as possible like the Word template provided by EC. Just simple stuff so far. The rest of the work on the annex 1 has been commenting out some sections that are not needed any more, and changing some headers to start-versions to avoid them showing up in the table of contents.

We have discovered that the paragraph on sub-contracting that we intended to write in the proposal, related to production of an animated video that will explain the important parts (and results) of the project, just was gone missing from the proposal. At one point we just commented out the section in the LaTeX sources, and forgot to put them back in. Not strange that it was pointed out in the ESR that sub-contracting must be explained. So this is another thing we need to get into Annex 1. The plan is to draft something by Monday.

Finally, we have started discussions about the Consortium Agreement this week. As expected, there are different points of view on this, and there has been some activity on the mailing list. By an advise from one of the partners, we have proposed to carry out the discussions about CA openly among administrators and legal people on a separate mailing list. The mailing list has been created, and is will be interesting to see how the discussions unfold.

Next steps: get all the administrators together in a telco to discuss the CA. However, I'm not sure we can squeeze that in before we go to Brussels. I will put up a doodle at least. Finalise the Annex 1 draft, and submit for review by P.O. on 15. May.

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.

Grant Negotiations—first steps

The first you have to do is to make sure that the coordinator (or at least his email) has an account on the Participant Portal. The kind of account needed is an External European Commission Authentication Service (ECAS) account. If the coordinator doesn't have one already, he will receive an email inviting him to create an account. Acting as an advisor (and as and old sys.admin) in this setting, I help the coordinator out, create the credentials for him and pass on the information.

As LEAR it is useful to be associated with all projects in the organisation, also during the negotiations. But EU leave this to the organisations to decide whether this is necessary. For instance, larger RTOs participating in EU projects in the hundreds will probably need to organise this differently. So, the LEAR is not automatically added with a role in the project, even for the host institution. The first thing I do when the coordinator log in (or I log in on their behalf) is therefore to add my self with the Coordinator Contact role in the project.

Now we are all set, and ready to start the real work. One of the first things to check is whether all the participants in the project have their legal status validated. In particular, if someone new participated (without a PIC or self-registered for a PIC during the submission), there will be important things to sort out. More on this and other issues in the next post.

Grant Negotiations

I planned to write a lot about the experiences related to EU project proposal coordination. But I haven't got enough time to figure out what to write yet. However, the results are now in. The proposal I coordinated my self was not good enough, and will not be funded. As I to some extent expected, we unfortunately got low scores on Impact, and was below threshold overall. So, no TEL project for me right now. But the theme will be called again soon, and I will look into the possibilities.

Simula participated in other proposals also, as I have mentioned before. And one of the other proposals we coordinated, and which I worked quite a bit on, was actually successful in terms of evaluation score. The coordinator received today an invitation to Grant Negotiations in Brussels, which will take place already on 22 May. We have never done this before, so I just have to dive in and learn. Hopefully, it shouldn't be to hard, and I know a lot of people to ask about it. So, I believe that in the end we will be just happy about it.

First thing: Read all about it in the Negotiations Guidance Notes at the FP7 Docs.

Next, learn about NEF and what else at the negotiation page.

Let's see if I can document the progress this time.