Beyond the horizon of Tempus projects. Theory and practice of project management

The main reason of this book is to disseminate the results of exploring strategies in the action of Researchers and Project Managers in international projects. The panorama of International Cooperation for European Institutions is receiving a great impulse, in recent years, owing to the start of Horizon Projects and to the new perspective of European Resources valorisation giving major relevance to break the wall existing between academic and non academic institutions. DOCSMES was a 2010 Tempus Project, some years before this strategy changed but, as most papers here edited, it was focused on a subject, the Entrepreneurship and SME Management, which implies a strong connection of delivered competencies and the demand of education coming from the recent new sensibility on this theme. Furthermore DOCSMES was a relevant opportunity to create a network among project managers, researchers and Universities which extended their activities in new project proposals and involved new partners according to the wideness of interest and the number of participant countries. The list of projects, which represents the sources of contribution presented in this book, could be significant of this evolution and of the strengthenings of networking activities undertaken by project partners not only inside projects but for the extension of project proposals whose number was naturally wider than the approved ones. BSC, MSC and PHD were interested by these projects with an increasing involvement of local systems and multidisciplinary topics mainly concerning the capacities building of organizations representing the civil society and stakeholders. In last times the Performance of Projects became central in the attention of partners with a more intensive motivation to teach proposals in advanced research topics and to new items of learning according to the faster renewal of studies and interests. From these motivations was born the idea of this anthology which reunifies original and just published materials concerning: 1) Research background and perspectives and 2) Lessons from the practice. In this way we increase the dissemination of DOCSMES Results; one among them, the most relevant, was the continuity of PHD organized by this Project as a good practice to promote further experiences. This result fulfilled, the resources used and the objectives scheduled, lead directly to the main question concerning projects and projects teams: the performance. What is the performance? The evaluation of performance is always a controversial item owing to many reasons: 1. The GAP between quantitative and qualitative approaches. 2. The complexity of concepts involved in the performance evaluation, mainly connected to Effectiveness and Efficiency but also related to Adequacy. 3. The uncertainty to define basic concepts like Result and its connections with Output and Outcome 4. The time perspective in which the evaluation has to be located: short, middle or long time. 5. The influence on the evaluation of the projects timing and its phases: during the project, in the imminence of intermediate and final reporting, after the project end. The answer to this complex panorama of items could be analyzed as a framework to read the variety of contributions published in this book in which these problems are discussed directly or involved indirectly by Authors that in different times and places analyzed the topics to be considered. The methodologies applied and solutions proposed are different through several approaches, le fil rouge connecting the analysis.