The i3-MARKET project, as much as any other ongoing R&I initiative, was heavily affected by the global COVID-19 pandemics. Both internal and external communications were influenced. 

However, a timely risk management and agile responsiveness allowed i3-MARKET project consortium to develop effective internal communication among the partners and successful external communication campaigns.

The steps:

Identify processes – This task is usually done by the project coordinator who has the best overview of all activities in the project. This step calls on mapping all the processes that are happening simultaneously in the project and the interaction between different processes.

Identify potential risks to processes – It allows us to clearly identify where the interaction between different partners and/or stakeholders is needed and whether they can be affected by all the implications of global pandemic (e.g., travel restrictions, social distancing, solely online communication, etc.).

Design response measures – For those processes that were identified in the second step as being in risk. While some of these measures have been already considered as a part of project’s overall risk management measures, others require some creativity and flexible response.

Identify the Barriers – A risk management for the risk management. It is necessary to consider early on all possibilities, advantages and disadvantages of the measures implemented in order not to lose time and not to attribute a lot of effort where it does not pay off. For instance, during the first wave of COVID-19 many projects jumped on organising an excessive number of webinars, which caused a general fatigue from the online events and people were simply tired and not willing to attend them anymore.

Find countermeasures – Implies a need to think of future mitigation measures should some barriers appear while managing COVID-19 implications. For instance, if the fourth step has foreseen that a fatigue of the online events could be a barrier, then the fifth step would look for potential solutions, such as recording online events, thus allowing people to watch later only some parts which they are most interested in.

Implement and monitor – Implement everything that has been planned and suggests to closely monitor the progress.