ResearchManagement

Research project management

A management group, made up representatives of all the academic partners, will manage the project. The management group will establish a project monitoring and evaluation framework for the project (see below). The monitoring mechanism will be regular management group review meetings (physical or virtual), attended by appointed staff. The reviews will ensure that the project is progressing as planned.

The management group will report every 6 months to a steering committee of public and voluntary sector consultation practitioners, set up at the beginning of the project. We will seek recommendations for membership of the steering committee from the E-Consultation Study Group, the Institute of Governance and Public Policy, the Letterkenny Institute of Technology, and associations of public or voluntary sector organizations, such as SOCITM, NICVA, the Wheel, NICEM or Disability Action.

We will use electronic collaboration technologies such as wikiwiki webs (for group document authoring), task tracking databases, and mailing lists to ensure continual communication and collaboration between project partners while carrying out the plan detailed above.

The substance of collaboration will, at the start, be the exchange of expertise between partners, as we have each followed distinctive lines of research previously. It is by synthesising this knowledge that we will be able to carry out a multi-factorial evaluation of e-consultation. Later on the substance of collaboration will change to focus on the project tasks, the mutual understanding research results, and the synthesis of reports.

Although lead partners are identified for each task in the project details, they will depend on the other partners to successfully complete these tasks. For example, NIRSA will depend on Letterkenny IT and QUB for identifying public authorities and community groups to study, some of the QUB-ran experiments in phase 2 will be carried out in Letterkenny, and QUB and NIRSA will be providing a lot of input from the first two phases of research into the workshops organized by Letterkenny IT and the E-Consultation Study Group.

Furthermore, by integrating research and dissemination, there will be frequent collaboration between the researchers and the outside bodies involved in public consultation.

The monitoring and evaluation framework will include two broad, parallel processes:

• An ongoing, reflective assessment of the innovative processes of consultation that the project is seeking to initiate and build
• A continuous monitor of project actions against objectives and performance measures, with a focus on need and impact on the beneficiaries (This will be an addition to, or elaboration of, the funder’s monitoring requirement).

In addition, the finance departments of each institution, in accordance with their normal research accounting practices and standards, will monitor all expenditure.

The milestones are:

Phase	Milestone	Month
1	Complete and report on context, needs and technology matching	7
2	Complete and report on experiments	12
3	Complete e-consultation guide and workshops	15
4	Complete and report on e-consultation trials	24