Sharing our first Delivery Plan

While the size, complexity and composition of our project may be unusual (particularly in the humanities) the questions we’re asked by others tell us that much of what we’ve learnt about working together on an emergent, blue sky research project could be useful for other projects.

Today we’re sharing the first version of our ‘Delivery Plan’ from 2019: https://doi.org/10.23636/5619-jd50. Our Delivery Plan is part of our governance process, setting out our overall goals and how we’ll ensure we meet our objectives. Sharing it is part of our commitment to transparency, and to sharing our lessons learnt as we ourselves learn them.

The main headings in this Delivery Plan come from a template that our funders, the AHRC, used for the Creative Industries Clusters Programme. The template contains six main sections: 1) Summary and Objectives, 2) Updated proposal, 3) Work Plan, 4) Finance Profile 5) Monitoring and Evaluation, and 6) Communications and Engagement. We’ve also included the Terms of Reference for our Project Management Board and Advisory Board. We’ve redacted some financial and other information, as you might expect.

We began work on this version of the Delivery Plan as the project formally began in late 2018, and finalised it in early 2019. The Preamble to this shared version was largely written in January 2020 when we first thought about sharing the Plan. This means that the document doesn’t show the benefit of hindsight – most noticeably, in early 2020 the full impact of COVID wasn’t yet apparent.

The Plan is a ‘living’ document. As we publish subsequent versions you’ll see our thinking and plans change in response to circumstances, from the impact of the pandemic, to how we organise our work, to new ideas for sources and approaches to our broader objectives.