In my previous post, we had a quick look at who is who in a European Commission Project. In this post, I will talk about the Contract Negotiation stage. If your project passed the EC Call Threshold then you will be automatically invited to the Contract Negotiation stage where EC will want you and all the other project partners (the consortium) to fill in a lot of paperwork and more importantly they will ask you to produce the DOW (in other words: description of work). DOW will be somewhat similar to the proposal itself with unique differences in IPR issues and partner descriptions. DOW is submitted to the technical project officer who then checks it and warns the consortium for potential changes, etc.
Apart from DOW, you will also need to please the Legal Officer who will ask you to fill in quite a few legal papers to do with the project and the partners. Once everything is completed you normally get a start date to start your project.
Contract Negotiation can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. If you are not a good project manager, I suggest find someone who is very good in organisational skills as they will need it! It can take a short time or a very long time depending on how fast you provide the information to the Commission. Compared to FP6 programme, the Commission is working much faster and everything seems orderly in FP7 projects.
If you have a specific question on the Contract Negotiation stage, please feel free to contact me using the from below.
