Research and Grant Management: The Role of the Project Management Office (PMO) in a European Research Consortium Context

This paper illustrates how a university-based project management office (PMO) can provide focused support across the entire grant project lifecycle within a European research context. In recent years, EU (European Union) research and innovation grant programs have increasingly shifted to support multidisciplinary consortia composed of industry, academia and end-users, which collaborate to achieve tangible and sustainable socio-economic impact. This scope change, from traditional academic research projects to research and innovation projects, has created the need for professional project management and has provided a fertile environment for PMOs to flourish. The paper includes discussion of an illustrative case study based on the EDEN2020 project - an ongoing, international, multidisciplinary consortium project in robotic neurosurgery that is coordinated by Imperial College London and supported by a grant from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Imperial College's PMO provides project management and dedicated support to the academic team to enable delivery of the overall consortium project. In so doing, the PMO involved in EDEN2020 clearly adheres to the PMO roles identified by the PMBOK (R) standard, i.e. supportive, controlling and directive, albeit at different levels depending on the grant lifecycle stage. In EDEN2020, the PMO was predominantly confined to a supportive (advisory) role in the project's ideation and grant negotiation stages, a controlling (supporting delivery through standardization, templates) role in the proposal preparation stage, and a more directive (leading) role in project implementation. The paper concludes with a recommendation to increase the number of cases under investigation and expand the scope beyond Europe.