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PINTAIL LTD

Pintail Ltd is an SME based in Dublin. The main company activities are software development, technology transfer, academic/industry collaboration, consultancy and project management, with an emphasis on the management of EU projects. Pintail personnel have been contributing to or managing EU projects since the early 1990s, in programmes as diverse as Esprit, ACTS, eContent+, eTen, FP6 and FP7. Pintail has acted as a ‘problem manager' for projects which have received ‘red flag' reviews, as a specialist subcontractor and as a full project partner (as in the case of CULTURA). Ciaran Clissmann, the Pintail staff member who will be the lead for CULTURA, has worked for two years in Brussels for the Commission, as well as managing STREPs or similar projects in a number of programmes.

CULTURA Team

Ciaran Clissmann is a director of Pintail Ltd. He has been involved in EU projects since 1991, writing proposals, managing work-packages and taking part in reviews. During 1999 and 2000 he worked as an expert in the Commission services in Brussels. Ciaran has a deep knowledge of EU programmes and what they expect from their consortia – this expertise will be deployed in order to ensure that CULTURA meets the requirements and priorities of the Framework Programme. In the last three years he has personally managed two projects (ClearView, funded under the eTen programme, which was commended as ‘one of the best run projects I have ever seen' by its review team, and PurStem, under the FP7 programme). He has given presentations and training on EU project management on behalf of Enterprise Ireland (the Irish body which stimulates FP7 activity among the Irish SME and university communities) and acted as a best practice exemplar for Irish conferences in this area. He has acted as an evaluator and rapporteur for the eContentPlus and EuroStars programmes of the EU, most recently in 2008, 2009 and 2010. He has extensive personal experience of digital humanities, acting as a consultant to MiBAC (the Italian Ministry of Fine Arts and Culture), to the Irish Library Council, and contributing substantially to the work of the Europeana, Minerva, Michael, DC-NET, INDICATE, Linked Heritage and ATHENA projects.

Contribution to CULTURA

Pintail will manage the day to day administration of the CULTURA project in collaboration with the coordinators, KDEG. Pintail will focus on consortium management, progress monitoring and scheduling, deliverable quality assurance, timesheet collection and validation, costs statement preparation, quarterly monitoring reports, reviews and routine EU liaison. This leaves the coordinator free to focus on the scientific aspects of the project while ensuring that the administrative aspects of project management and EU liaison are competently delivered.

The administrative and bureaucratic burden of managing an EU project can lead to overload on the coordinator, due to his mix of scientific, financial, administrative and reporting tasks. Pintail's involvement will remove much of the time-consuming administrative work from the shoulders of the coordinator, enabling him to dedicate his time to more strategic scientific work. The extensive experience of Pintail in the management of EU projects also means that those tasks mandated by the Commission (e.g. reporting, costs statements/Forms C, etc.) will be carried out efficiently and effectively, minimising their impact on the project as a whole.

Pintail will also be active in the dissemination and exploitation work-package of the project, with input into dissemination strategy planning, dissemination materials creation, event delivery and reporting. Our background in business planning, commercialisation and intellectual property (particularly intellectual property for cultural heritage material in collaborative online environments) will enable us to make valuable contributions to the exploitation deliverables.

Finally, Pintail is active in the evaluation work-package, with a special focus on internal evaluation and progress monitoring.

Related Work

Pintail has been involved in the creation and delivery of European digital culture projects for several years. Our track record includes Collaboration in the preparation and delivery of several key EU projects, including the MINERVA, MICHAEL and DC-NET project groups and Europeana "feeder" projects such as EuropeanaLocal and Linked Heritage.

Pintail has also worked with universities and SMEs in Ireland and across Europe in the creation and delivery of projects in ICT, Health, Marie Curie, eTen and other programmes.