Written plans, a shared dashboard and minuted meetings: how I-PLAY keeps an 18-month, three-country Erasmus+ Sport project on track.
An 18-month, three-country European project cannot run on good intentions. It runs on written plans, a shared dashboard and meetings that are properly minuted. Here is how we do it at I-PLAY.
What people see of a project are the workshops, the photos and the platform. What determines whether it works is what they don't see: who measures what, how often, and what happens when something goes off track.
In July 2026 we are in month 6 of 18. And by now we know that the invisible part is what holds everything else up.
Three documents that hold it all together
Before training anyone, we did something less glamorous: we wrote down how we would check that what we do actually works. There are three documents, and all three are complete.
Quality and Evaluation Plan v.1 (May 2026), prepared by our partner organisation SEDA in Kraków. It defines the project's indicators, who measures them, how often, and what happens if a figure strays from what was planned.
Dissemination and Communication Plan (April 2026, updated in July), also prepared by SEDA. It sets out target audiences, channels and responsibilities: SEDA oversees the dissemination strategy, and each organisation disseminates in its own language and through its local networks, with at least one content update a month on the project website.
Risk and Contingency Management Plan, completed and owned by the coordinating organisation. Each risk is rated by likelihood and impact, with assigned responsibilities and mitigation measures defined in advance.
The difference between a useful plan and a decorative one is that the useful one changes. The July communication plan is not the April one: it was updated because the project had moved on.
The dashboard: one panel, three countries
All of this is lost if it lives in three different folders. That is why project management runs on a single dashboard shared by Spain, Türkiye and Poland, presented at the kick-off meeting.
It brings together task blocks, meetings, indicators, dissemination and finances, as well as the work schedule, shared templates and team contacts. Each task has a lead organisation, dates and a status; each indicator has its target value and what has been achieved in each country.
This means our targets do not wait for the final report. The 500+ participants expected, the 18 events, the 100+ educators to be trained and the 5,000 people to be reached are rows that are updated and reviewed.
And it goes into detail. The documentation of four traditional games per country — 12 in total — appears on the dashboard with its deadlines and lead organisation: final selection of games on 6 May, common content template on 20 May and first drafts by 25 May 2026.
Meetings that actually work
We began with the kick-off meeting on 12 and 13 March 2026 in Donostia/San Sebastián, with all three organisations in the same room and a visit to Kroma in Errenteria.
Since then we have held online coordination meetings on 4 May, 25 May and 16 June 2026. For each one, the dashboard records the date, the topic and the organisations attending: progress on the training work and template deadlines, review of those templates, and preparation of the training of trainers in Türkiye.
The minutes procedure is set out in the quality plan: date and time, topics discussed, decisions taken and tasks with deadlines. Minutes are circulated within seven working days, and partner organisations have ten days to approve them.
Decisions are taken and recorded. At the kick-off meeting we agreed on the style of the training platform, on documenting four traditional games per country, on hour-and-a-half online workshops and on the social media dissemination rhythm, with posts every two months and a newsletter at key milestones. Four months on, we are still measuring ourselves against those agreements.
A meeting without minutes is a pleasant conversation. A meeting with minutes is a verifiable commitment.
Transparency and risk, in practice
The division of responsibilities and budget between the three organisations was set from the outset in the bilateral agreements between the coordinating organisation and each partner. Every organisation knows what it is responsible for, with what resources and by when.
European funding arrives in instalments and is distributed in instalments: the first was shared among the partners in April 2026 and the second at the end of July. Each transfer is recorded on the dashboard with its date, so any partner can check where the project stands without having to ask.
The same goes for risks. The Risk Management Plan is not an appendix to be filed away: each risk has its likelihood, its impact, a responsible person and a measure planned in advance. When something goes off track, it is recorded, reported to the consortium and resolved by a set date.
Real projects have setbacks. What sets a consortium apart is not avoiding them, but how quickly it resolves them and how clearly it reports them.
If you manage a European project, let's talk
Quality is not a chapter in the final report: it is a monthly routine. Three living plans, a shared dashboard and minutes that hold people to account are worth more than any statement of intent.
If you manage a European project and would like to see how we have set up our monitoring system, or if you are looking for a coordinating or partner organisation for a proposal, contact us via www.abarka.org. We are happy to share what is working for us and what we have had to correct.