Enforcing one unified SCORE process together

If we follow the same process for the challenge and solutions working groups we might be able to:

• Provide better project management
• Have better insights to what is actually happening on working groups
• Enforce the right people to be on projects

For the Kick-off meeting Claus and I developed a process that I feel can serve to fulfil this purpose. I propose following this process to the letter and changing it whenever it doesn’t work. The process can be found at:

http://score.partners/process/

Is there anyone against this? And @claus, how can we enforce this?

Which parts of the process are you referring to? Atm I see a too optimistic planning, but no fallbacks if things go wrong.

It seems the page hasn’t been updated, in which phase are we now? According to my calendar we should be “testing” and “scaling”.

Good, point. This process is meant as a general process that could be repeated for every challenge that comes into being a solution (and alternatively to create the challenges for existing solutions). The times mentioned shoud just be an indication.

Following for instance Step 2 ’ Research: challenge working groups’ in order to come to a solution definition means that you can’t progress without getting some of the right stakeholders at the table.

@HansF, do you have a suggestion for how we could build in fallbacks? As well as how we can indicate that this process should be living and change whenever we learn?

Facilitating also means building overviews of what 's done, what needs to be done, and who will build it. It means involving the stakeholders and building a network of people in the cities.

Regarding your question: you’re asking me? I honestly have no idea. Maybe Bax&C can do some research or fall back on previous lessons learned?

Bax & Company is a leading European innovation consultancy. We help corporate directors, entrepreneurs and policy makers to create, execute and manage cutting-edge science and technology enabled initiatives that deliver substantial societal, environmental and economic impact.

Seems like it’s time to take out the heavy guns, fall back on your experience or escalate to the senior partner. Ask yourself, what would Laslo do?
You guys are here to deliver, not to go trough a learning process on methodology, this would be a nice plus but isn’t part of this project imho.

@HansF - thanks for both this and your other contribution. I’ll respond in one go as they are linked.

First I’d like to openly acknowledge your frustration at the difficulty of progressing, and suspect some others in the partnership feel the same way. @Boris , @h.niesing and I certainly do, and are working together to develop a strategy (and memo) for moving forward.

SCORE is very ambitious and complex (more so than we initially thought). We are working with an Open project logic, which is new to many, have multiple working groups heading in different directions, that require the active collaboration between diverse stakeholders inside partner sites (i.e. problem owners, domain specialists, and IT technical people) as well as diverse experts across partners (from water to mobility to open data), each working at different speeds within their organisational constraints, with each organisation involved needed to go through internal decision making processes before they can move forward. Combined, this has resulted in slower progress than expected over the past 6 months.

To date we have indeed, as you point out, worked with a bit of a ‘speculative design’ (I use this loosely) approach - setting ambitious goals without a predefined trajectory on how to get there. We have also consciously been putting more emphasis on the ‘how’ we collaborate, and not the ‘what each person does’.

We felt this is the best approach given the complexity of activity taking place, and as it allows each partner to do what makes sense for them - working from their own motivation and at their own speed. It does of course rely on each partner to be self starting and take responsibility for their participation and their project outcome. Moreover, we are happy that we are having this conversation here in the open, as we think these are all really valuable discussions, and that if we can get the open methodology right, the project impact can scale far beyond its original aims and timeframe.

That being said, for this to work everyone does need to communicate with each other openly via the community (and here I admit I’m also still doing too much bilateral emailing with partners).

Besides this, there is of course still some project-level ‘overhead’ work - i.e. Digipolis made a great contribution to WP3 set up, which wasn’t originally on your plate, and I interpret your comment here as an open invitation to all partners to roll up their sleeves and get to work on common project activity as well as their internal activity.

But yes, we have done an in depth critical evaluation on the project so far (developing on our collective retro at the partner meeting) and are working on a revised strategy/plan for the next 6 months and hope to share this shortly. We’d love to get your input on this, here on or the WPL/a bilateral call. Hugo also invited Joran to contribute to this.

@h.niesing, @Boris & Claus

Ps: @Amsterdatamas has a great short paper on making successful EU projects, closely related to this discussion