Interviewee: F4, Digi-ICTU
Role: facilitator
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Personas
In terms of roles, the structure included work package leads, partners, lead partners, a steering committee, and a sounding board for advice. Every partner had an incentive to contribute actively — you had to prove your involvement to receive funding, so nobody could just sit back. Roles were largely standard and assigned at the start, without a separate collaboration agreement.
Facilitator role
it’s often a role where you connect different parties. Whether my role is more directing or supportive depends on the situation. A good example: in the “Co-Create Your Research” project on labor-saving technologies, my involvement varied a lot by organization. P-Direkt already had an internal team experienced in working with students, so they could largely guide the process themselves — my role was mostly coordinating to make sure things happened. CAK, on the other hand, had no such experience, so I spent much more time upfront explaining what to expect, and continued supporting and facilitating throughout. Same project, very different roles.
Facilitator s relation to decision makers project leaders
The client’s role varies — some give me a lot of freedom and trust my lead, while others are more hands-on. In practice, strategic decisions are usually made together: I lay out my considerations, we discuss them, and the client makes the final call. How decisions flow more broadly depends on the type of project. In advisory work, our advice is often leading. In result-driven projects, you align closely with the client on what the outcome should be. And in larger programs, responsibilities are defined per work package — so within my area, I had final say.
First phase start
At the start of any collaboration, I try to set up a clear governance structure: who is responsible for what, how decisions get made, and how to escalate if things don’t go as planned. What those agreements look like depends on the scale — a few-month project with two partners is very different from a three-year EU-funded program with a consortium of seven. The latter requires nearly a year of preparation before you even start, with KPIs and deliverables already written into a grant agreement. Changes are possible, but require formal approval.
Second phase understand
In larger consortia, getting alignment is simply harder — everyone has a vote, and there’s often a steering committee on top of that. The core activities aren’t that different, but there’s more coordination and more risk of people interpreting things differently. In the three-year program, the first year was mainly about getting to know each other, the second about learning from each other, and the third about actually building and creating. Shared language was a painpoint: We eventually created a shared glossary to make sure we were actually talking about the same things. Without that kind of shared language, frustration builds quickly. Keeping everyone aligned physically was managed through monthly full-day meetings early on, which gradually became less frequent.
Fourth phase experiment cocreate
most time spent within my own work package, making sure we delivered what we were responsible for. That was essentially a smaller project within the larger program, and that’s where the bulk of my daily work lived.
Fifth phase transfer
No response recorded.
Sixth phase finish
No response recorded.
Tools used
No response recorded.
Monitoring progress
Staying informed across work packages happened mainly during the full-day meetings, where each team gave an update. In between, there was little cross-package contact, and almost nothing was documented — notes stayed in people’s heads or on their own computers. With so much staff turnover, that’s a real problem. I always advocate for shared, accessible notes, and we had a shared Teams environment, but sharing notes still wasn’t the norm. When I asked for notes from a meeting I missed, the answer was often “I’ll just brief you” — while I knew they’d been typing along the whole time. Updates to the steering committee happened quarterly, with each work package submitting a short text on progress. That was essentially the only document where updates were consistently visible to everyone.
Collaboration
in-person days were consistently the moments where real connection and understanding happened — the many digital and fragmented meetings in between couldn’t replace that.
Specific painpoints
Personnel turnover was a challenge — nearly every organization had changes throughout the three years, making continuity difficult. I was one of the few who was there from start to finish. The biggest pain point overall is understanding each other, especially across disciplines. The word “innovation” alone means something different to everyone.
Room for improvement
There are clear peak moments in terms of workload — midterm reviews and end-of-program reporting, for instance, where you have to deliver reports, financial overviews, and presentations to the European Commission. Those are administratively intense, and good templates would help enormously. But they often don’t exist, so everyone ends up making their own — which shows. A tool meant to create alignment in the consortium was the “mini-contract” — a canvas mapping partners to objectives. In practice, it created more confusion than clarity. It was treated as a required deliverable rather than a genuine alignment tool, never really discussed, and never revisited. Most people, myself included, didn’t fully understand it.
Platform requirements
No response recorded.