E.2

Quality of the Work Programme
The project partners in the consortium possess the necessary skills, competences and expertise so that the work programme can be carried out in an efficient and effective way. Their complementarities are taken into account in the distribution of tasks and activities. This enables a quick start of activities and contributes to timely delivery of results. We have taken care to restrict the partners who work on WPs to those who can make a key contribution to them - this is especially so with the highly specialist work in WP4 on Success Factors and in WP6 on Piloting.

It was found useful to separate the field research (WP2) from the analysis of the field research (WP3); and in addition the topic of Success Factors (WP4) is separated so that a small team of specialist partners should handle that. Similar thinking leads to a separate WP on Consultation via the International Advisory Committee (WP5), as these meetings combine research and dissemination functions.

We propose a "pure evaluator" approach to quality and evaluation (WP9) - in other words, the evaluator does not have any other workpackage tasks (except of course for project management). However we believe it is better practice and more cost-effective to require that each partner takes on a small role of self-evaluation, in other words to be a "reflective practitioner" - which the evaluator can draw on and foster, leading to a more integrated and cost-effective approach to evaluation.

Much thought went in to the allocation of effort to project management (WP1) so that the project management effort could be kept to just over 10% of total effort. This included ensuring that other tasks (such as WP management) were not included and that only a subset of partners (the WP leaders) needed to have frequent tele-meetings - and even to consideration of how the role of the evaluator would overlap with the project management work package (note the lower allocation in WP1 to the evaluator).

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