Project management services by ACTIF-Europe

• Evaluation of projects (European, transnational or multicultural)
• Audit of projects
• European Technical Assistance (support to Technical Assistance Offices)
• Projects support & coaching
  • Implementation and design of European partnerships and alliances
  • Continuous support to European projects
  • Carrefour for support to transnational partnerships.

ACTIF-Europe has developed a strong know-how through its European activities from the inside of the offices of the European Commission and as well from the European projects point of view.

• The External evaluation as proposed by ACTIF-Europe consists in supporting project all along its life and development so it is able to:
  • define its mission, goals, objectives and to identify the right critical success factors;
  • speed up partnership cohesion at national and transnational levels by implementing common procedures, language adapted at each level (based on TQM - Total Quality Management approach and on NICT);
  • implement a benchmarking system for the project;
  • enforce measurement and monitoring procedures so that the project can compare results against initial objectives at each key step and react just in time;
  • alert and advise project partners in case of deviation from original mission and goals.

External evaluation is complementary to any internal system that the project must have implemented.
External evaluation has an advisory and guidance role. External evaluation only supports a project and cannot replace lack of coordination nor enforce a project into some developments that are not decided by the partners.
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• Audit is more an instant picture of the status of the project, the structure, the partnership or the organisation:
  • to identify sensitive and strong points;
  • to validate procedures which have been implemented;
  • to measure a set of indicators;
  • to evaluate or assess the impact.
  • ...

Not as external evaluation, Audit is not based mainly on advisory approach but on an official measurement and comments on the results detected.
External evaluation is a more integrated and participative approach where the evaluator goes more along with the project during its life.
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• Technical assistance to European offices presents several level of services:
  • help to define information system strategy and ICT policy
  • help define mission, goals and objectives of the office
  • advice to implement procedures, information/documents workflows, to define administrative and production processes
  • management of teams
  • detachment of human resources to implement ICT and/or working procedures
  • support to networking national structures and the required ICT for cooperative work.

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• European projects support and accompaniment
  • Support to design and implementation of European projects and partnerships has two strong phases:
    • transnational project initial phase:
      • support to identify action framework;
      • support to design a proposal to a call for tenders (targeting, mission, partnership, ...);
      • critical feedback on proposals.
    • implementation of transnational project:
      • support to launch a project and to prepare partnership guidelines;
      • support to implement evaluation system.
  • Continuous support to European projects: is a very tight relationship between the project and the external evaluator. So the project can manage in an optimized way resources (including time resource) and fulfil objectives. (cf. External evaluation). Various tools are implemented or proposed by ACTIF-Europe:
    • Definition and implementation of common tools (common language, image of the project, ...)
    • Introduction to various tools or techniques based on Quality Assurance (QA) approaches
    • Support to design self-evaluation grids or check-lists
    • Support to implement operating procedures linked to the main process of the project or of the hosting structure
    • Help to identify and use most appropriate ICT
    • Common communication platform (Carrefour de communication) and exchange platform for project partners (Private Forums for partners, Common area for cooperative groupware on Intranet)
    • European Observatory and Technological observatory services can be accessed via the Club ACTIF
    • ...
  • Carrefour for support to transnational partnership is based on Internet technologies and propose to project or network members to:
    • work on same documents,
    • exchange information and opinions via forums (which can be private ones)
    • access to the latest results of external evaluation on their own project
    • monitor their results towards objectives
    • inform other members on the status of the project
    • have a direct access on a permanently updated calendar on mandatory administrative actions of their project
    • have access to one single and always available repository to share, archive reference documents on a project
    • be informed on latest technological news that ACTIF-Europe has identified on ICTs
    • be informed on latest news of some European programmes or of some DGs
    • ...

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