Cancer Research UK

How do you manage multi-organisational projects across Europe?

The problems Cancer Research UK faced

Cancer Research UK needed an online collaboration tool which required minimum engineering costs. It also needed to be accessible to people of different backgrounds, who could take advantage of Projectplace’s transparency.

“We needed an intuitive and reliable mechanism to support coordination and the development of deliverables as part of an EU project that includes 9 partners, including CRUK, 6 other universities throughout Europe and 2 commercial partners. We also needed a cross-platform tool with minimum maintenance requirements and which would appeal to a diverse community of users including academics, researchers, software engineers and project managers,” says Dan Grecu, Engineering Coordinator for a research project funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme in Information Society Technologies. His role is to coordinate the efforts of the project partners to transition theoretical argumentation models into generic software components and real-life applications.

How Projectplace helped

Cancer Research UK began using Projectplace three years ago, primarily as a document repository. They used our version management control to avoid duplication issues.

“Projectplace was mainly used for document management and for sharing applications that were developed as part of the project. It has been an extremely versatile resource for developing documents that required input from multiple project partners, and the versioning functions were particularly useful in this context,” comments Dan Grecu, “but, in this case, the project's objective is to develop argumentation models and technologies.”

Projectplace made the collaboration tasks for the development of project deliverables transparent. We also enabled Cancer Research UK to focus on project issues of primary concern and easily bring together a diverse project community working on a variety of computing platforms.

“Projectplace has allowed us to maintain a high level of shared project awareness and has given us the confidence that the reasons for which we subscribed to this tool were reliably fulfilled,” continues Dan, “everybody found Projectplace very intuitive and the use of on-line documentation and help functions was sufficient to support both regular users and administrators in their tasks.”

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