D. 2.1: The Five Phases Of Project Management

D.2.1 - Project management

The first phase of project management is to develop the project plan. In particular, the project is organized in a set of work packages and each workpackage is divided into a set of detailed tasks. The relationships between the tasks have been determined carefully based on several discussions and meetings with the project partners. We have further surveyed several similar projects that attempted to develop postgraduate programs in other fields of study while developing the plans for this project. The expected duration of each task has also been estimated in order to estimate the total completion time of the project percisely. Based on that, a gantt chart is developed and resources allocation plan is devised including

This committee will be formed of experienced management representatives from both partner and program countries. The comittee will be responsible for making strategic decision, updating project plan, and monitoring and controlling the project activities and therefore their meetings will be held twice a year.

The project coordination will be based on a coordination system. The details of the propsed coordination system will be discussed in the next section. Furthermore, the communication between the project partners will be conducted using the communication tools (email, Skype, project web site and others) and by organising periodical meetings, the project control will be established.

Project ownership is ensured by distribution of leading roles to all partners, fair budget distribution to partners and involvement of all partners in all project aspects and

In particular, the PO will be responsible to prepare a project management document (PMD) to be authorized from all partners as per the commencement of the project. This document will include the authorized organizational structure of the project, and the role and responsibility of everyone in this structure. Furthermore, it will define the communication means between the partners, project committees, WP leaders and their deputies, and task leaders. The schedule of project meetings and reporting will be fixed.

The proposed coordination system will attempt to achieve smooth flow of information, documents, and other entities of the project through the effective communication links between the different parties of the project. The decisions and work orders will be communicated from the PC and POC to WP leaders. Then, the communications will go from WP leaders to WP deputy and task leaders. Task leaders will conduct meetings with his selected group to perform the task. The task leader will communicate progress reports to WP deputy about the status of the task completion, and the WP deputy will collect the progress reports and prpare another one to be communicated with WP leader about the work progress in his WP part. The WP leader will report to the POC and PC about the prgress in his