Next generation tools to optimize HE proposals and project management
Why upgrade the structuring and writing of your response and how to remain original and avant-garde?
Table of contents
- Published by: Roxane Bibard
- Reading time: 3 minutes
Faced with rising European expectations and increased competition, managers and researchers are equipping themselves to make life easier, save time and increase their success rate. If it is necessary to equip yourself with writing support tools, be careful not to lose quality and pay attention to the confidentiality issues when using AI tools.
Managing European projects can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to align multiple partners to writing the proposal and reporting the project’s progress.
The impact section is critical for securing funding and demonstrating the potential value of your project, while effective reporting is increasingly demanded by the European fundings in order to justify the allocation of funds.
Competition for this type of funding is growing fierce. It’s not enough to make a good application with a good rating, you have to be able to stand out from the crowd and be THE best application to obtain European funding!
And if you think that IA generation tools can get you a great proposal faster, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Respecting confidentiality, consistency and originality of response remains complex.
The 4 main challenges as to HE proposals writing and project management
The Technical Description (part B HE) is one of the most crucial components of any European project proposal. It requires a detailed understanding of how your project will benefit not only your organization but also the broader society, economy, and environment.
The priority challenges most of European manager face are:
1. Lack of competence on the topic of impact
Impact is still an emerging topic in the research and innovation world. The European Commission’s focus on the impact of projects to allocate research and innovation funding is still fairly recent.
R&I players didn’t have the time to become acculturated and to train in depth so as to be able to meet the requirements. This led to approximations, inconsistencies and errors concerning the impact of the project.
European project managers are the first on the front line, and need to get up to speed quickly, not only to assess the project’s potential impact, but also to convince researchers of the importance of this aspect in the response and bring about a change of state of mind.
As a consequence, many institutions call on external consultants to provide assistance in this area.
2. Tight deadlines to write the proposal and achieve overall consistency
Most consortia are set up late in the process, leaving little time for drafting the collective proposal. Not only do the teams need to find time to dedicate to this task, they also need to be able to find common times to meet and reach agreement.
In this race against time, we sometimes have to make compromises, or even dead ends, on certain aspects of the dossier. And although the impact on society is an important part of the response, it’s often the one that gets overlooked because it’s the least known and understood, unlike the scientific activity and impact.
Above all, continuous changes during the rewriting phase can harm the flow of the entire document.
3. Finding and onboarding new partners while maintaining harmony
To meet the requirements of calls for projects (in terms of geographical diversity and profiles), consortia often need to be strengthened.
This means identifying, contacting and convincing new organizations to join the team, partners with the right expertise, who are also aligned with the consortium’s values and working approach. It is increasingly required to call on SHS or organizations representing civil society, for example.
But finding the right partner is not easy in such a short space of time.
This can mean extra time and work to align project members or working with the same partners you are used to for questions of speed and confidence, which does not promote neither innovation nor originality.
4. Difficulty to ensure team alignement and reporting
Aligning all project members can be time-consuming and challenging, especially when you deal with multiple stakeholders and a variety of project objectives.
But once the proposal has been put together, the next stage promises to be even more difficult.
Once the project is launched, the European Project Managers have to track the consortium’s progress and report back to Europe. It’s an extremely time-consuming and frustrating job. Many of the managers have to chase after each member of the consortium to collect and compile the data, while ensuring that it is consistent and up-to-date. When you’re managing 5 or 6 projects with more than 25 partners, it can quickly become an overwhelming nightmare.
These challenges have a major impact on projects and their future: time that can’t be spent on higher value-added tasks, frustration to missing out on financing and simply being abandoned.
The hidden costs of automation: when digital tools undermine your Horizon Europe proposal
Traditionally, professional use multiple basic tools such as Word or Excel, spend countless hours of research, consultation, and multiple revisions before the documents are filled in.
This time-consuming processes can pull valuable resources away from other critical aspects of the project, leading to delays and stress…and a lower-quality application or/and implementation.
The choice now is to either stick to these traditional methods or upgrade now your processes to gain efficiency to stay at the edge of competition.
Different tools exist, specialized in the different phases of European project, from partner finding to project monitoring, and there has been a current race for generative AI tools lately as to content re-writing.
But there are many pitfalls and also risks using any tool to upgrade your proposals.
1. AI writing assistants: a double-edged sword
Smart tools may make your proposal look like everyone else’s! How to remain avant-garde?
While these platforms offer to help you optimize your rewriting, they simultaneously expose your confidential research data and project intention to external servers and potentially compromise your intellectual property.
More disturbung is the gradual homogenization of proposals across the research landscape. As institutions increasingly rely on AI assistants for crafting their impact sections and research narratives, the risk of widespread standardization is taking hold. The unique voice that once distinguished groundbreaking research gets smoothed into a uniform tone, making it increasingly difficult to stand out in a competitive field where originality and innovation are paramount. In addition, expert evaluators, well-versed in reviewing proposals, and the probability – currently under discussion – that the review of proposals will also be done via AI tools will spot non original AI-generated sections, potentially undermining your proposal’s credibility rather than enhancing it.
2. When too many tools ruin efficiency
Adopting specialized tools for each aspect of Horizon Europe proposal preparation adds friction and heaviness to the work of researchers and project teams.
How to juggle between the time efficiency of a compartmentalized tool to avoid inconsistent information and the risk of errors when versions of proposals multiply between different tools?
It’s particularly crucial with consortium partners who might be using entirely different sets of tools themselves. In the end, what was meant to simplify the proposal process adds layers of complexity that can jeopardize the quality and timeliness of your submission.
Constantly switch between different interfaces and workflows disrupts the natural flow of proposal development and can induce hidden costs of multiple subscriptions for your IT. In addition, this could lead to IT security and confidentiality risks, training needs to use the tool and complexity in managing the access rights of the different partners.
But the fact is, it is necessary to structure, simplify and optimize the work of project teams.
How so?
A visual representation of your HE proposal
A smarter way to manage HE proposals
Our new online tool changes the game. Funded under a European commission RRI project, we co-designed an an all-in-one tool with European project managers during workshops, interviews and tests, to streamline the entire process of writing the Horizon Europe proposal, making it quicker, simpler, and more efficient.
Here’s how:
1. Guided template towards impact
The tool provides a pre-built template specifically tailored for European project requirements. You will find anything you need for a robust impact: Key Results, DEC Tasks, KPIs, Outcomes, Impacts, Target Groups.
2. Collaborative features for efficient teamwork
European projects often involve international consortia and multi-disciplinary teams. Our tool includes collaborative features (team chat, tracking of modifications and comments on each element) that allow team members to work together in real time, in asynchronous mode making it easy to incorporate diverse inputs and expertise while ensuring consistency throughout the document.
Each member knows what to do, and any change to deliverable dates and tasks are notified to team members.
3. Checking the consistency and impact depth of the proposal in real time
Continuously improve the proposal thanks to our Impact Analysis tool. The consistency of the path to impact is checked, and advice is offered on how to improve.
A snapshot of our Impact Analysis Tool
4. Generation of final application documents
Export in .docx your Part B with the 3 sections: ‘Excellence + Impact + Quality and efficiency of implementation’.
5. Structured follow-up & reporting
Once your project is launched, the coordinator and work package leaders can monitor progress through a light Gantt chart, track deliverables, a list of milestones, and assess KPIs, including progress towards impact. Whether you need to report back to stakeholders or funding bodies, you’ll have all the data you need at your fingertips.
If you’re ready to take your European project management to the next level, our tool is here to support you.
Save time, enhance collaboration, and ensure your projects have a lasting impact with the power of technology at your fingertips.
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