A project should be about true collaboration where the sum of the parts is greater than the individual contributions. Our motivation is to help coordinators and project leaders to build a collaboration that will last. We are really interested in getting the output of a project sustainable, delivering long-term successful products. Get the best out of grant money to deliver real benefits for society.

Our management style is aligned to the AGILE behaviours:

• Transparency
• Collaboration
• Rich communication
• Self-organisation
• Exploration

We understand project management. Although for scientists, project management is not the most interesting part of a grant program it often is a crucial part of the project’s success. Hands4Grants offers you support on your project management tasks and has a vision of helping you to create self-supporting teams in order to keep the costs for management and overhead at an acceptable level.

 

Planning

We can help you create your project plans and execute your project according to those plans in compliance with the rules of your grant provider. That sounds simple, but project management has many aspects and the plan is only one of them.

Nowadays you can find an array of planning tools and collaborative platforms. These tools help you to create to-do-lists and enable direct contact between all your team members. Keeping your email box clean and not loosing too much time searching for the right information is a big plus of using planning tools and collaborative platforms.

Project planning, however, goes beyond the tools used and involves processes dealing with factors like resources, time, budget, specifications, deliverables and milestones or key performance indicators. In our network we are very fortunate to have an experienced project planner, dedicated to provide you with the best project reports and forecasts. This support will turn project planning into a useful part of the project strategy instead of letting it end up as an obligatory part of the project archive or project reporting.

Hands4Grants combines this analytic approach of the project plan, its progress and its output with the equally important emotional aspects of the team and the collaboration of the team members.

 

Project Team

The biggest success factor of your collaborative project is the performance of the team. Hands4Grants is there to facilitate team performance. By listening well to the individual perspectives and by integrating these to find the common ground for collaboration, we hope to identify synergies that will motivate people to commit to the project and to increase the value they will get out of the collaboration. Face-to-face meetings with surveys, creative exercises, workshops and tools such as the collaborative canvas are used to stimulate and build a strong committed team.

Each team evolves along a certain pattern on its way to high performance, which psychologist Bruce Tuckman first described as “forming, storming, norming, and performing” in his 1965 article “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.” To turn the collaboration into a high performing team, Hands4Grants offers the team a coach by listening well, communicating open and clearly, and by motivating individuals and teams towards solutions. We are focused on creating a good team spirit and aim to help generating a collaboration that will last.

As all projects will divert from their original plan, flexibility and ‘going the extra mile’ are trademarks of Hands4Grants in order to offer you a tailored solution in management support. Our solutions involve all stakeholders, including the project team, the grant providers, and clients (if applicable). As all individuals engaged in the project have the potential to make it fail, only a good collaboration can make the project a success.

 

Experience

Hands4Grants and its network host a wealth of experience in complimentary disciplines such as planning, management and communication. Prince2, MSP, Critical Path Analysis and Agile are part of our management toolbox.

We are trained in Prince2 and Prince2 agile, we do not favour one agile approach over any other, but with due care and consideration we can provide a holistic project management approach that can be tailored to suit a wide variety of conditions and working environments.

We like to be engaged in a project from the start, as this phase is critical for team selection and the management structure given to the project and we can continue our support until the end when project outcomes will be implemented and sustained. The level of support can be tailored to the support needed and we will always strive for self-supporting teams as much as possible. When successful, that means that Hands4Grants’ support would only be needed in transitions phases between the different stages of the project, keeping costs flexible and manageable.

 

Workshop

The power of combining Agile and classic project management – Wendy Aartsen

Design your work plan using the best of both worlds.