Contribution to standards and regulations

Section 5 - Quality of consortium and management

5.1 Management structure and procedures

The DECISIVE consortium contains 35 partners from 10 countries, each of them having a very clear role in the project and all sharing a strong commitment towards its achievement. For each country the partners of that particular country have appointed a Country Coordinator (CC) (See Annex B), who is responsible to coordinate the national proposal, project progress, and reporting and communication with national authorities.

This section presents the main organization principles. The Project Leader (PL) will be responsible for the coordination and day-to-day management of the project throughout its whole lifecycle. PL is the primary interface to contacts and organizations external to the project. In this role, PL is supported by the Work Package Leaders (WPL) and Country Coordinators (CC) who, on a regular basis, will provide PL with all necessary technical and organizational information. Each CC will send a biannual status update (with, e.g., the expended effort, technical achievements, etc.) to the PL. When recognizing major problems, PL has the possibility to call for an extraordinary meeting of the Project Coordination Committee (PCC) or Project Management Team (PMT) or a full meeting of the partners depending on the type or severity of the problem.

The Project Coordination Committee (PCC) is responsible for all strategic and financial decisions; the PCC will be composed of one representative from each partner; each representative should be in a position (inside his/her own organization) which allows him/her to make decisions and to take corrective actions if needed, for all matters regarding effort allocation and priorities, and will be responsible for the partner's involvement in the project.

The Project Management Team (PMT) is responsible for the daily operation of the project and consists of a Project Leader (PL), Technical Coordinator (TC), Exploitation Manager (EM), Work Package Leaders (WPL) and Country Coordinators (CC) who together will be in charge of the technical decisions as well as the quality check of the deliverables. PMT will identify problems and risks and coordinate technical risk mitigation action plans with the approval of the PCC.

PCC and PMT will meet face-to-face or via video-conferencing, every three months. In the mean-time, other meetings will be arranged if needed, including audio-conferences when appropriate. It is assumed that most (not to say all) decisions will be made by consensus. However, in case this is not achievable, the controversial decision will be voted at the majority; in case of equality, the project leader will make the decision. Technical meetings, focused on specific technical topics, will be encouraged. Biannually, PL will send a short update to the project officer, by email, to report on status. A project internal file repository/web site and mailing lists will be set up at the beginning of the project, to facilitate sharing of information amongst partners.

Work Organization

The project has been organized in eight work packages, themselves composed of tasks. Work tasks will be named “Tx.y”, where “x” is the work package number, and “y” is the number of the task. Deliverables will be assigned to tasks and will therefore be named “Dx.y.n”, where “x.y” is the task number and “n” is the number of the deliverable inside the work task. Each work package is under the responsibility of a Work Package Leader (WPL) who is in charge of the overall quality of the work achieved in this area. Each work task has itself a Work Task Leader (WTL), who is responsible for the quality of the work done within the work task, including the timely delivery of deliverables.

In DECISIVE, the quite detailed project planning makes it possible to let most of the detailed technical decisions to be taken in a decentralized and bottom-up manner. First, partners working together in a work package identify and solve open issues on their own. Next, these findings are contemplated in the PCC on a regular basis with respect to the other work package’s concerns. In some cases the PCC may get to a point where a very fundamental decision has to be taken, having a great impact on the general direction of the entire project or gravely influencing one of its major objectives. Then, this decision is forwarded to the PCC. In contrast, management issues are handled by the PCC in the first place. On all levels, conflicts should primarily be resolved by finding a solution that is well acceptable for all partners. Only if this is not achievable, the issue is put to the vote. Equal votes are resolved by the WP Leader or Project Leader respectively.

Exchange of information will mainly occur via an internal wiki work area. The basis of the project communication lies upon the adoption of mailing lists, one for technical and business development matters and a closed one for administration and evaluation purposes. A global mailing list will be used for project management announcements. Sub-lists will be used to support country and WP specific communication. Partners will be individually responsible for communication by mail and organising technical meetings within tasks.

For each Project Deliverable, each partner has to provide a specific contribution according to the project Work Plan and the Action Item List, provided by the WP Leader at the start of each Work Package and agreed by the partners participating in the work package and the PCC. Each partner will apply its individual Quality Procedures in order to self-assess his/her own contribution. For the Major Deliverables of public dissemination type, a review procedure with the following steps will be adopted: release by the Work Package Leader to the Technical Coordinator (TC), two-week review period for comments by PCC, two-week amendment period to incorporate PCC recommendations, one-week balloting period for final approval by the PCC. For other deliverables, the following review procedure will be adopted: release by the Work Package Leader, one-week balloting period for comments by all PCC members. In any case, the comments of each partner are communicated by email addressing all other involved partners in the deliverable (mainly by using mailing lists). The responsible partner is responsible to forward guidelines for the incorporation of comments to all other related partners according to a specific time schedule.