The lifecycle of a project runs from the planning and design stage through the various implementation stages, monitoring  and feedback throughout the programme and final reporting. Evaluation of the project successes and failures is a subsequent stage outside the scope of co-ordination of a project.

A key lesson from the GEDT projects is the crucial need for a central node of control overseeing and ensuring integration and implementation of all project activities, and communication between all those involved.

Key lessons

• The extent and pressures of the coordinating role are sometimes underestimated.
• One central individual need to hold reins of partner and player co-ordination. Different role-players may make incorrect assumptions about who is doing what. This can happen at the level of practical arrangements and at higher levels of information sharing.
• The project coordinator should have a certain amount of status so that he or she can freely access officials at provincial or national level, or decision-makers at funding organisations. This may be necessary if interventions are required to get a project back on track,  if significant changes to project design or financial projections are needed.
• Coordination also involves making sure that vital information emerging during implementation is captured. For example, the ongoing recording and capturing of factual project information for monitoring purposes provides hard data on the project and should not be neglected. User-friendly instruments need to be developed at the planning stage, and their use across sites coordinated and monitored. In addition, critical insights need to be recorded and documented: In project7, for example, it noted that  valuable reflective insights from coaches during the training sessions were lost.

Implementation

Projects come up against implementation challenges because of bad planning, in that risks or barriers were not sufficiently identified and planned for at the outset of the project. Even well-planned projects may get derailed because of unforeseen factors, such as changes in the policy context, changes in the school environment, the people components involved or other unexpected variables.

The key implementation lesson from the GEDT projects is related to flexibility in project management: if unforeseen variables are negatively affecting progress towards project outcomes, project management and key stakeholders need to be able to re-negotiate aspects of the project, without undermining credibility of outcomes.