In a recent JA PreventNCD article, we introduced the Synergy Scope, a tool developed to make tasks, pilots and relevant contacts across the Joint Action easier to identify and connect.
To take a closer look at the thinking behind the tool, how it can support collaboration across a large and complex consortium, and the role of the Data Management Board in its development, we spoke to Emilie Ebdrup Steenberg-Hansen and Frederikke Kold from the Region of Southern Denmark.
JA PreventNCD is a large and complex Joint Action. What challenge was the Synergy Scope created to address?
JA PreventNCD is a very large and complex project, with many Work Packages, tasks, pilot activities, partners and countries involved. This also means that a lot of activities are happening in parallel, and it can be difficult for individual partners to have an overview of what is happening outside their own Work Package or area of work.
The Synergy Scope was created to address this challenge by bringing information about activities across the Joint Action together in one place. The idea is to make it easier for partners to see what others are working on and to identify activities that may be related to their own work.
For example, two teams may be working with similar target groups, risk factors, types of interventions or data without necessarily knowing about each other. By making this information visible and searchable, the Synergy Scope can help partners identify relevant expertise, potential collaborators and the right people to contact.
So, rather than replacing the existing coordination structures in the project, the Synergy Scope supports them by making the project more transparent and easier to navigate.
Ultimately, the aim is to make it easier to identify synergies, share knowledge and reduce the risk of duplicated or disconnected efforts across such a large consortium.
How does the Synergy Scope work, and what can consortium members use it for in practice?
The Synergy Scope is an interactive Power BI dashboard that brings together information about activities across JA PreventNCD. Consortium members can use it to explore the different Work Packages, tasks and pilot activities, and to see information such as which countries and partners are involved, relevant contacts, target groups, risk factors and other characteristics of the activities.
The dashboard has different filtering options, so users can explore the project from different perspectives rather than only looking at their own Work Package. For example, if you are working on a particular topic, you can use the Synergy Scope to see whether similar or complementary activities are taking place elsewhere in the Joint Action, identify relevant expertise or potential partners, and find the right person to contact.
This can be useful when preparing a new activity, deliverable or event, or simply when you want to understand how your own work connects to what is happening elsewhere in JA PreventNCD. The aim is to make the large amount of information within the project easier to navigate and use in practice.
Consortium members can access the Synergy Scope through the project’s SharePoint site, where it’s a tab called Synergy Scope on the left side menu. We are continuously working on updating both the data and the dashboard itself as the project develops, so the Synergy Scope will continue to evolve throughout the Joint Action.
What kinds of synergies and collaboration do you hope the Synergy Scope will help create?
What we hope to achieve is to make it easier for people working on related topics to find each other across the Joint Action. With a project as large as JA PreventNCD, relevant expertise or similar activities may exist in another Work Package or another country without people necessarily being aware of it.
By making these connections more visible, we hope the Synergy Scope can support the sharing of methods, tools, experiences and lessons learned between tasks and pilots. It may also help avoid unnecessary duplication, because partners can see what is already being done and potentially build on existing work rather than starting from scratch.
One area we are currently working on is developing more cross-cutting dashboards around the prevention packages. For example, instead of only exploring activities according to Work Package, we want users to be able to look across the Joint Action at themes such as alcohol or tobacco and see which activities, partners and countries are working within the same area. This could make it much easier to identify connections and opportunities for collaboration across the traditional Work Package structure.
So, ultimately, the ambition is that knowledge and useful approaches can travel more easily through the consortium, and that the Synergy Scope can help connect people who might otherwise not have known that they were working on related issues.
The Synergy Scope was developed through the Data Management Board. What is the role of the Board within JA PreventNCD?
The DMB is one of several coordinating bodies in JA PreventNCD, alongside the Publication Board and Ethical Board, bringing together representatives from the different Work Packages. It has an internal advisory function on data-management issues and provides recommendations to the consortium.
DMB members act as contact points between the Board and their respective Work Packages, giving the Board a cross-cutting perspective across the entire Joint Action. Its role includes advising on data-management practices, contributing to risk-benefit assessments, and supporting relevant documentation and reporting.
That cross-project perspective also created the conditions for developing the Synergy Scope. While mapping data across the project, the DMB identified that several activities and objectives could benefit from joint implementation, but recognising those opportunities depended on having visibility across Work Packages.
This led to the establishment of a DMB-mandated task force to develop the Synergy Scope, which gradually evolved from a simple data overview into an interactive survey and dashboard tool.
In a consortium as large and diverse as JA PreventNCD, no single Work Package has full oversight of what others are doing. Structures such as the DMB can therefore play an important role in providing that cross-cutting perspective and identifying overlaps and potential synergies across the project.
What have you learned from developing the Synergy Scope, and could this approach be useful beyond JA PreventNCD?
One of the main things we have learned is that creating the dashboard itself is only one part of the work. In a project as large and constantly evolving as JA PreventNCD, a major challenge is actually collecting the information, keeping it up to date, and presenting it in a way that remains understandable and useful for different users.
We have also learned that the Synergy Scope needs to evolve together with the project. It originally started as a way of creating an overview of the data collected and generated within the project, but as we developed it and received input from across the consortium, we saw that it could have a much broader role in supporting coordination, knowledge sharing and identifying synergies.
An important lesson has therefore been the value of involving users in the development process. Feedback from the Data Management Board and other stakeholders has helped us identify what information and functionality would actually be useful. At the same time, we have learned how important data quality is. The Synergy Scope can only provide a useful overview if the underlying information is accurate and sufficiently complete, so following up on missing or outdated information and keeping the data updated is an ongoing part of the work.
Going forward, we would like consortium members to use the Synergy Scope not only when they need to look something up, but also as a way of exploring the Joint Action: seeing what others are doing, finding relevant contacts and expertise, and identifying opportunities to connect their own work with activities elsewhere in the project.
We are continuing to develop and update the tool based on these needs and on feedback from its users.
We also think the approach could be relevant beyond JA PreventNCD. Large Joint Actions and other European projects face many of the same challenges, with a large number of tasks, partners and countries involved and many activities taking place at the same time. In that sense, we see potential for the Synergy Scope not only as an internal coordination tool, but also as something that could inform and inspire similar work elsewhere.
By sharing both the Synergy Scope and what we have learned from developing it, we hope it could provide inspiration for future projects on how to structure, map and create an overview of a very large and complex project. It is not necessarily the exact dashboard that would need to be replicated, but rather the approach and methodology behind it: how information about many different tasks and activities can be structured in a way that makes connections across a project more visible and the information easier to navigate.
This is something we would like to explore further and share beyond the consortium.
Thank you to Emilie Ebdrup Steenberg-Hansen and Frederikke Kold for sharing their insights into the development of the Synergy Scope and the work behind it.
The Synergy Scope is available to members of the JA PreventNCD consortium through the project’s internal Teams environment.
If you are part of the consortium and have not explored it yet, we encourage you to take a look. Whether you are searching for related activities, trying to identify the right contact or looking for new opportunities to collaborate, the Synergy Scope is designed to make it easier to see and connect the work taking place across JA PreventNCD.