Plan of activities and guidelines

Date: June 18, 2020
Category: Uncategorized

Project Information

AAL Programme

Project – SAfety of elderly people and Vicinity Ensuring – “SAVE”

Deliverable: D5.1 Plan of activities and guidelines

Version: 2.0

WP5 Leader: UniTBv

Table of contents

Introduction

  1. Management Responsibility
  2. Document and Data Control
  3. The Project Management Board
  4. Internal Communication Strategies
  5. Project Reporting and Monitoring
  6. Risk Management

Conclusions

Introduction

The Plan of activities and guidelines (PAG) is the document setting out the activities and guidelines for the actions and outputs of the project, aiming to provide assurance that the quality requirements are planned and implemented appropriately.

This Plan is to be used by:

The PAG is an integral part of management planning. It has been prepared in this early stage of the project, in order to demonstrate and provide the Consortium with the assurance that:

The PAG specifies the activities to be implemented, including their stages, steps in order to ensure that the project and its deliverables should conform to specific requirements. Those responsible for ensuring that the required activities are carried out, and the resources, which are crucial for their successful completion, are identified within the subsequent chapters of this document.

In that respect, the Quality and Assessment Plan includes explanations necessary to show how quality requirements for activities are met, and it’s structured accordingly.

A list of such activities is the following:

PLAN OF ACTIVITIES

WP1 – Technology framework (M01-M29)

Technology base assessment

Technology Club activities include:

Deliverables:

WP2 – End-user involvement and Service Feasibility (M01-M29)

Deliverables:

WP3 – Test and validation (M01-M36)

Deliverables:

WP4 – Business Exploitation (M01-M36)

Deliverables:

WP5 – Management and dissemination (M01-M36)

Deliverables:

MILESTONES

1. Management Responsibility

The current Plan is applicable to all the activities related to the project. The internal quality control system is aimed to ensure the conformity of the deliverables quality as well as coherence among WPs. The idea is to involve in the assessment of deliverables other partners, for example two partners, not directly involved in the revised deliverable, so they can provide comments and suggestions. The assignment of reviewers will be mainly based on the interrelation and relevance to other WP´s.

In order to ensure that the contents of all deliverables comply with the Project Contract, each partner identifies the responsible for the administration of the Plan who has the authority to identify problems during internal audits and to initiate actions, resulting in effective problem solutions. All problems should be raised within the project meetings, unless an urgent problem, which is realized as a significant constraint to project progress work, comes up and should be handled via email exchange and/or Skype and debated, in case of no solution, in the periodically Skype meeting. The minutes of the project meeting should describe the exact problem and record the agreed solution, as well as the time bound action to be taken to solve it. Once a problem has been identified, there is a requirement to provide sufficient evidence that the problem has been cured. The quality control will also permit to check that public procurement procedures, implemented by the consortium for the grant of services and experts, are respected and the subcontractors will be selected on competitive grounds – on the basis of best value for money.

The procedures which will be implemented include the establishment of an effective risk management strategy aimed at identifying and timely resolving potential risks. Potential management risks will be monitored by the Coordinator Partner (CP), updated once new risks are identified along SAVE AAL’ implementation.

Project risks will be monitored according to the following methodology:

To facilitate the management, an internal web-based project management platform sharing system has been set up for partners (on Google Drive). The project foresees also a quality control system with a clear view on the project’s envisaged outputs and how intermediate steps have to build up towards that output. This is particularly challenging as there are several intermediate project goals to be achieved within WPs, whereas each WP consists of a number of tasks with their own targeted outputs. The objective of the SAVE AAL quality management is to ensure that all tasks and WPs deliver high quality outputs – to form best quality inputs for the subsequent tasks and WPs.

During the project’s composition, some potential risks and proposed risk mitigation measures have been identified, as described in the table below:

Table 1: SAVE AAL Risk Register

Risk typeLikelihoodImpactRelevanceMitigation
Poor performance of project partnersunlikelymoderate4Each WP is led by WPLs who are experts of the given domain and have earlier experience in working in teams, hence they can inspire the involvement and engagement of the other members. They will continuously monitor the activities of the members and report the deviance if so to the CP. If the given partner does not fulfill the contractual obligation, after raising his attention and giving deadline to complete the poorly performed tasks, the consortium can decide on changing the status of the non/underperforming partner.
Poor communication/ cooperation within the consortiumunlikelymoderate4The LP will manage the consortium to achieve the work plan and the activities’ schedule. E-mails, Skype, phone, Google Drive or Dropbox as a knowledge management tool will be used as day-to-day communication. There will be bi-montly skype calls on the progress and 6 monthly personal meetings to ensure the fluent communication.
Financial liquidity problemsunlikelyminimal2In case of serious liquidity problem jeopardising the implementation of tasks, the status of the given partner can be modified and another partner will be involved to execute the tasks complying to the contract.

2. Document and Data Control

The quality of the project will be also ensured by the conformity of data to be collected and used in the WPs. As previously mentioned, quality control will take place in the form of: bi-monthly conference calls between the PROJECT MANAGEMENT BOARD members to discuss the work progress taking into account risks and contingency plan and if a WP falls behind schedule. Milestones will be fundamental for checking this progress. If a milestone should not be reached, the CP together with the WP Leader will prepare a plan to bring the WP back on track as quickly as possible. However, the internal communication system, should function as such that deviations from the agreed work plan are observed before the milestone checkpoints.

The system contains two levels of documentation:

  1. The control of internal documents
  2. The control of formal deliverables overall quality

2.1. Deliverables layout

Official project deliverables must have a first page template created by the partner responsible for the WP. The partnership must also use the page layout (headers/footers) suggested in the same Deliverable. Furthermore, they should abide to the following rules:

2.2. Dissemination event scheduling and reporting

The following are considered dissemination events:

3. The Project Management Board

The overall management structure consists of the Project Management Board (PMB) as the ultimate decisionmaking body of the partnership. Each member of the partnership delegate one representative and one deputy.

The Board is chaired by the Project Coordinator’s representative. The PMB monitors the implementation of the project, evaluates it at its half-yearly meetings and takes strategic decisions to ensure that the objectives of the project are fulfilled, foreseen results are achieved and the project is duly implemented.

Its work is supported by Work Package Leaders. In particular, it is the PMB members’ responsibility to approve the allocation of budget and sufficient human resources to ensure the implementation of the work packages.

Particular attention will be laid on exploitation/ dissemination issues, knowledge management, IPR, continuous monitoring and evaluation. PMB is responsible for decisions related to quality assurance, risk management and deviations in implementation.

The work of the PMB is supported by the IPR manager appointed to develop IPR-related guidelines and continuously feed in IPR related knowledge.

The process for the peer reviewing of a deliverable is that the deliverable under consideration/ examination will be forwarded, through the Work Package Leader, to all the members of the Project Management Board.

3.1 Deliverables peer review and control of non-conforming deliverables

This paragraph describes the peer review process of the produced deliverables and what are the procedures to be followed, when a Deliverable is not conforming to fundamental requirements. The Deliverables peer reviewing is undertaken by the PMB members. The responsible PMB members, after having studied the specific Deliverable under consideration, must evaluate it with respect to a set of key points.

It has to do with general comments and includes the following key points:

Apart from the above mentioned general key points, a set of specific comments are to be inspected for the specific Deliverable and are summarized in the following:

4. Internal Communication Strategies

This section describes the Internal Communication Strategies, which is adopted between the Project Partners. Frequent communication among partners is anticipated and/provided via:

  1. email
  2. e-conferences (Skype)
  3. telephone
  4. Google Drive
  5. Conflict resolution procedures
  6. Project slides
  7. Interim Reports
  8. Financial Statement Forms

NOTE:

EMAIL: In the object of each email related to the project remind to write first “SAVE AAL” and then the object of the email.

5. Project Reporting and Monitoring

Reporting is directed towards maintaining the relationship with the AAL Central Management Unit and National Financing Agencies / the National Contact Points as well as controlling the project progress and the use of resources.

As regards reporting towards the Financing Agency, SAVE AAL will compile the interim reports and a final report, asa well as 4 annual progress and financial reports. As regards internal reporting and monitoring tools, a periodical reporting system is envisaged.

All project partners are requested to send, in addition to all formal work and financial statement reports, an interim technical and financial report to Coordinator partner every 6 months.

The project is divided in the following reporting periods to AAL CMU and NCA/NCP:

These are used by the Coordinator Partner to concentrate the previewed milestones. Furthermore, when other key issues/problems are found, they will be evaluated and may cause alarm warnings by the PMB Warning alarms may be raised in the following cases:

  1. BUDGET-RELATED: If strong deviations are found out for any partner, concerning actual and predefined costs. This is valid for each partner and for each cost category.
  2. TIME-RELATED TO SUBMISSION OF DELIVERABLE: If 1/2 month before its issue date no draft is available, this is a warning.

Day-to-day management of the project

In order to ensure the co-working method and make the most update version of documents available to all partners, tele-working tools will be used for day to day management and communication with the consortium including file sharing through Dropbox/Google drive, file transfers, virtual meetings.

The project coordinator will also be responsible for the proper financial management of the project including the establishment of an internal controlling system and provision of relevant internal quarterly templates to be used by partners. The internal reports of partners will give update information on project implementation and will also feed into the annual progress and financial reports as well as into the mid-term and final review.

WP leaders shall be responsible for the overall coordination, management and proper execution of tasks of their respective WPs (reaching of milestones and achieving adequate quality of the deliverables). They regularly report on the status of deliverables to the Project Coordinator and to the PMB.

WP leaders maintain clear and constant communication with the partners contributing to their WPs and are responsible for interactions with other WPs.

Each WP leader will hold regular virtual meetings (at least 1 at every 2 months) and six monthly WP meetings.

The conclusions and key findings of each WP meeting will also be summarized in written form.

6. Risk Management

Project risks describe the impact on the project such as diminished quality of the end product, increased costs, delivery delays, loss of market-share, or failure.

Risk management incorporates the following activities:

The main actions to prevent risks are described below:

For the various project activities related to work involved in the project work packages the following are identified:

An information and communication activity on risks must be used for identifying new risks as well as modifying the status of risks, tracking the status and monitoring the mitigation strategy evolution. Work Package Leaders are responsible for giving the Coordinator partner and the PMB alerts and warning related to their respective work packages. These are to be consolidated by the Lead partner who maintains an updated version of the Risk Management Plan for the project.

Conclusions

This document presented the plan of activities ans processes for providing assurance that the quality requirements are planned appropriately and the actions analyzed in the relevant sections are compliant with the Project Contract of “SAVE AAL”.

REFERENCES

[1] „Project Management Body of Knowledge”, Project Management Institute, 2018

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