Taking stock of the project: Looking Ahead 1
What could be improved in future?
- Allow enough time for potential partners to meet, discuss and set clear objectives for international work: invest time and money in planning (but also be open to innovation that can happen during project and so cannot be defined at outset)
- At start, each potential partner country could give a presentation to provide background to their country, relevant to transnational project, and give a rough idea of what they would want to do during the transnational work
- Consider the use of an intranet to boost communication between meetings
- At meetings, provide 'review time' to check progress of the whole project
- Have further ways of monitoring progress, in addition to reviews at meetings
- Be aware of cultural differences and take time to better understand these (e.g. in this project it took some time for Ireland - a country which makes large-scale use of peat as fuel - to understand the strong conservationist approach to lowland raised bogs in Scotland, where such a habitat is very scarce)
- Take care to make allowance for language/translation challenges at meetings: there can be resource limitations on translation, but important to speak slowly and clearly in presentations and discussions. Rapid-fire speech (in any language) will leave some partners baffled.
- Explain 'who is who' in terms of how organisations relate to each other within different partner countries i.e. share information on administrative structures relevant to project
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