During the 2nd year of CYBELE project, a worldwide pandemic outburst causing immediate changes in the way of working. This had an immediate affect on the EU projects which are based on collaboration and sharing of ideas and workload. INTRASOFT, as the Risk and Quality Manager of CYBELE, reacted on this threat and activated immediately a monitoring mechanism to identify all potential risks and consequently the mitigation actions needed to face and minimize the impact of the unpreceded conditions that all partners around Europe were dealing with.
Early on, INTRASOFT initiated a risk management exercise to identify and then document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across all CYBELE’s Work Packages and tasks. Following a collaborative approach with all WP leaders, INTRA proposed an detailed tracking template with all accumulated information on the status of each beneficiary (remote work activated, level of curfew in various countries) and a severity estimation of risks per task and activity in the project.
The risks were identified based on the severity and the likelihood to happen with the following colored tags:
1. Low
2. Low – medium
3. Medium – high
4. High
All partners were very responsive in the above exercise and provided their information and view on potential risks. The graphic below, concretizes the risks and mitigation plans as consolidated by INTRASOFT.
Figure 1 COVID-19 identified risks and mitigation actions
CYBELE’s approach towards facing the challenges that the pandemic brought in our way of working is to:
1. Adopt a constant and structured way of monitoring the impact of the COVID-19 waves across all partners and their organizational procedures and across the work implement in the project.
2. Work closely through weekly WP calls and sharing online tools in a more frequent manner
3. Follow health protection measures across all beneficiaries in an attempt to minimize as much as possible the infection possibilities of the involved personnel.
4. Plan future work and get prepared for unforeseen COVID19-related developments
By following the above steps, we already managed to overcome the difficulties and to minimize the identified risks.
CYBELE went through a successful review in September 2020, achieving all the expected milestones and delivering high quality results. This constitutes a tangible proof that the CYBELE consortium is working efficiently even under unfamiliar conditions.
Walking towards the 3rd year of the CYBELE project, we are confident and prepared to face the challenges ahead us and ensure a smooth collaboration and efficient results.