The ERC Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants, and the MSCA postdoctoral fellowships, awarded respectively to individual Principal Investigators and postdoctoral researchers, are simpler to manage from an administrative point of view as they do not entail the coordination and communication challenges inherent to large international consortia. However, most of the points listed below can apply to them too.

Rules 1 to 3 apply to the whole grant management lifecycle. Rules 4 to 6 cover the aspects related to the preparation of the Grant Agreement (GA), which involves the gathering and collection of all the necessary technical, legal, financial, and administrative information and documentation leading to the GA signature. Finally, Rules 7 to 10 address the post GA signature phase, i.e., the implementation of the project properly speaking, and its coordination and management over its lifespan.

Congratulations, your proposal has been selected for funding! Soon after learning about this positive outcome, the funding agency will invite you to prepare the GA. You will be provided with details of the EU project officer (PO) who will accompany you in this process. The PO will be your main contact point for all matters related to the GA preparation and in most cases for the subsequent implementation of your project. Over the lifespan of your project, your PO can change. Make sure to establish and maintain with them the best possible professional and working relationship, as you will have to consult them on many occasions for any relevant grant-related issue, especially those needing prior approval.

Remember that the PO will want your project to be a success as much as you do, so consider them as an ally willing to help find solutions to possible obstacles or difficulties appearing over the lifecycle of the project. From the beginning, take the time for a proper introductory phone or video call together (usually the PO will take this initiative) and to agree on the way you will interact with each other. You should define the frequency of your contacts, what type of issues need their attention, etc. You should see the PO as a facilitator and catalyst whose goal is to ensure you will implement the project successfully, delivering the expected outcomes and impact, and respecting the rules and conditions defined in the GA. All in all, you should see the PO almost as an (external) member of your team!

Engage all your team members and people who will be involved in your project from the start. You should put in place a series of best practices allowing the relevant information to flow naturally between all of you. Plan and have regular meetings with your partners to discuss the work plan, tasks, activities, and possible issues. The periodicity and arrangements of such meetings should be agreed beforehand by the team. With the development of a plethora of collaborative IT tools such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams, international research teams working on common projects can now benefit from improved communication channels.

Over the lifetime of your project, it is likely that some conflict will appear at some stage, be it for scientific reasons or disagreements, a collaborator dropping out of the project, or for some observed misconduct or misbehaviour. If issues arise among some of your partners which may put at risk the implementation and successful achievement of specific project tasks, you should act as a mediator and facilitator, trying to find compromises and accommodate possible solutions, such as the redistribution of tasks and responsibilities among the other members of the team. If necessary, it may be useful to have a neutral stakeholder (external to the project) intervene. The devil is in the details, and you may find out too late, for instance, that not all the partners are using the same parametrisation, methodologies, protocols, endpoints, and other important determinants of the experimentation. Synergy demands that all results of the consortium are interoperable and consistent so that they can contribute to a reliable conclusion or product.

Most probably, you will not be able to be on top of all issues regarding your project. This is why you should surround yourself by people with the appropriate training, background, and/or professional experience. This will allow you to delegate some tasks you may feel less comfortable with. Enrol people with diverse profiles, as it takes more than just scientists to properly manage a research grant. Depending on the size and complexity of your project, you may wish to have a dedicated project manager, who would deputise and take the lead in all daily nonscientific aspects of the grant. You also need people with budgetary, financial, and legal background, and administrative support is often necessary.

Good news for you: All the relevant information and tools that you need to properly manage your grant is usually provided on the funding agency’s website. In general terms, you will find the necessary documentation, such as guidelines and templates covering the whole grant implementation lifecycle, namely the awarding phase and GA preparation, project monitoring and reporting, payments, and grant closure.

The tasks related to the GA preparation will be the first set of actions you will have to coordinate and perform. Although it may seem like purely administrative work for a researcher, it is essential that you get properly involved in this process as it will help you to better understand what it entails to manage (for the first time) an EU research grant. In principle, you will be given few weeks to provide relevant technical, financial, legal, and administrative information prior to the GA signature.

If you managed previous grants under Horizon 2020, the predecessor of HE that was implemented between 2014 and 2020, you should take the time to check the differences in the GA structure and content. As a researcher, you do not need to know all of it in detail, but you should at least grasp and understand how it is structured. Additionally, it is essential to realise that the GA contractual obligations are institutional, as it is the beneficiaries, i.e., organisations, that are signatories (parties) to the GA, and not individual persons. This is why the GA is not signed by the scientific leader or manager of the project directly, but by a legal representative of the institution, e.g., dean, vice dean, director, or any person with an equivalent status and capacity to legally represent the organisation.

In most cases, the first milestone after the start of your project will be the kick-off meeting. It is crucial that you prepare it carefully and properly. It will allow all the partners to meet each other. It may bring a larger audience of relevant stakeholders as well, such as the PO and other actors who will be involved in your project, in one way or another, such as support staff from the institutions involved, policy officers, and/or legal representatives. Depending on the scope and size of your grant, the kick-off meeting may involve also other interest groups at local, regional, or national level and may be open, at least partially, to the public in general.

Take maximum advantage of this meeting and ensure that you cover all aspects related to grant implementation and management. Agree about the agenda with the PO and leave enough time for questions and answers from the partners. In this meeting, you will have the opportunity to discuss with the rest of the partners not only the scientific and research goals of the project, but also the aspects related to the management of the grant. Have a diversified set of speakers, covering also the legal, financial, and administrative context of what it entails to be part of an EU research grant. A common mistake of some grant recipients is to tend to focus only on the scientific goals of the project, and to disregard other relevant aspects from the GA obligations. Do not forget to present the roles and responsibilities of each partner, such as Work Packages (WP) and task leaders, and the timeline of the milestones and deliverables to be achieved. The Consortium Agreement should also be presented (Rule 6).

As soon as your project starts, it is important to put in place some IT tools, platforms, repositories, or structured folders in which you will keep records of the activities developed and implemented throughout the lifetime of your grant. It is of utmost importance to be able, at any point in time, to provide proof or evidence of the work performed, in case it is requested by the funding agency or audit services.

In the specific case of EU research grants, the tasks and activities to be implemented during the lifetime of your project are detailed in the DoA and structured into different WP. Each WP has a number of planned deliverables—some of which will become public domain, while some others will remain confidential, depending on their level of sensitivity—to be submitted as scheduled in the DoA of the GA. These deliverables usually are the result of WP-related specific tasks. In case your DoA does not include a Gantt chart with the timeline of the activities to be implemented throughout the lifetime of the project, it is advisable to create one (or a similar tool) that will allow you to monitor the activities scheduled over time. Make sure your dedicated repositories or project folders are safe and secured, to store there all your relevant documents and use an adequate IT tool to keep a structured overview of the project’s activities. Beneficiaries have the contractual obligation to keep records and supporting documents usually up to 5 years after the end of the project in case they need to document proper implementation (GA Article 20). Do not forget that these records and documents may also be needed for checks and reviews (Rule 7) and can be requested for audits too (GA Article 25). Ensure that all the partners participate and commit to keep track of their tasks. It is common that partners tend to concentrate on scientific tasks and overlook other activities, such as those related to communication, dissemination, and exploitation (Rule 9). The coordinator must be able to monitor and report on all the activities of the project, collect outputs, and request contributions from all beneficiaries involved in a particular WP.

The reporting exercises are key milestones falling under the project management responsibilities, as they inform the funding agency and the PO about the progress made in a given period, to assess the quality of the work performed, to acknowledge possible delays or deviations from the original plan, and to check and validate the costs you are claiming. Each funding agency will have specific requirements concerning its grants reporting features, all of which are contractually defined.

Should you not have the time (or discipline) to deal with the continuous reporting yourself, consider hiring a project or grant manager, full- or part-time. If this is not possible, ask for administrative support from your organisation (Rule 3). But be aware that a skilled or experienced project manager will certainly ease and relieve your workload. They will not replace you in your role of project coordinator but will guarantee effective and smooth continuous reporting.

Be aware that it is only upon the approval of the periodic reports that the amounts you received as prefinancing will be cleared and further intermediate and final payments can follow. The submission of periodic reports is done electronically via your personal page of the F&T Portal, under Grants -> My project(s). Periodic reports are due according to the schedule defined in the GA Data Sheet. Do not underestimate that a significant part of the reporting exercise in a multi-beneficiary consortium consists of collecting information and contributions from each of the partners, so anticipate and plan these tasks well ahead of time and use the existing templates available in the F&T Portal to prepare the reports.

When managing research grants, it is not enough to perform good science, you need to ensure that what you do is compliant with the conditions defined by the funding agency and that you follow the “rules of the game,” including those related to communication, dissemination, and exploitation of research results. By implementing an EU research grant, you are using European taxpayers’ money. Hence, it is logical that you keep overall control and supervise the management of the grant, and remain responsible and accountable towards the funding agency. A good use of resources is key, in order not only to produce research outputs, but also deliver on the broader outcomes and ultimately deliver the societal impacts expected in the Work Programmes and call topics.

I would like to thank my colleagues from the European Research Executive Agency who kindly took the time to read this article and provided insightful and useful comments to its final version. I also warmly thank Prof. Miguel A. R. B. Castanho, from the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes, of the Lisbon University Medical School, Portugal, for his valuable input and suggestions for improvement from a grantee’s perspective.

David G. Pina is employed by the European Research Executive Agency, a funding agency created in 2007 by the European Commission, with the mandate of managing and implementing parts of the EU’s Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation.

All views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and may in no circumstances be regarded as an official position of the European Research Executive Agency or the European Commission.