TEMPUS CORINTHIAM

408Guide of Good Practices TEMPUS CORINTHIAMand sequence among work packages. Generally speaking, each project foresees theappointment of units and committees such as:1. steering or management committee, that is usually in charge of the overallmanagement of the project together with or assisting the coordinator2. quality assurance committee, that is usually in charge of designing andadopting tools to evaluate the project3. scientific committee that could replace or be added to the steering committee;communication committee, etc..4. task forces, that are the operative cells of the projects and are responsible forthe achievements and outcomes.The connection among task forces and committees could be more or less articulated.We just point out that projects with a high number of partners or geographicallydistributed may require a strong steering committee and more levels of control anddecision. Projects with few partners can be based on a flat model and more informalrelations.Regarding issues that were not covered in the project proposal, we can mention:a. Financial management.There are three main models of financial management with lots of shades in between:fully centralised, fully decentralised, and mixed. The decision of the model usuallydepends on the coordinator (in synergy with the partners) as the financial handbooklet the consortium free to organise these aspects, once all the financial conditions andrules are respected. These are the main features of the three models:I: fully centralised. The coordinator decides to manage the entire budget internally,without any financial transfer to the partners. It could be the case ofprojects with a vast amount of partners (for example thematic networks)where most of the budget is dedicated to the organisation of events and staffcost has been attributed mainly to the Coordinator with limited contributionby the partners as co-financing. In that case, the coordinator could centraliseall the payments, contracting a single travel agency that will work for all thepartners, setting a centralised policy of per-diem or “cost of stay” reimbursement,etc. The advantage is the full control of the financial management;disadvantages could be the high administrative burden in the hands of thecoordinator (rules must be clearly set) and potential lack of accountabilityof the partners. A constraint could be the degree of financial flexibility of thecoordinator.II: fully decentralised. This model is exactly the opposite of the previous one. Thecoordinator distributes the entire budget among the partners according to the