With 25 countries, more than 100 partners, over 100 tasks, almost 100 pilot activities and a consortium of more than 800 people, JA PreventNCD is a project that brings together an enormous amount of expertise, activity and information.
That scale is one of the Joint Action’s greatest strengths. It also creates a very practical challenge: how do you know what is happening across the project, where to find the information you need, and who to contact?
People working within JA PreventNCD are often highly specialised, focusing closely on their own task, pilot, Work Package or area of expertise. In a project this large and geographically distributed, it is therefore not always easy to maintain an overview of what is happening elsewhere.
That could mean understanding activities taking place in another Work Package, identifying related workstreams elsewhere in the project, or seeing which JA PreventNCD activities are taking place within a particular country.
The JA PreventNCD Synergy Scope was developed to help address this challenge.
Built as an interactive Power BI dashboard, the Synergy Scope provides a central platform for exploring activities across the Joint Action. It brings together information on tasks, pilot activities and relevant contacts, helping consortium members understand what is happening beyond their immediate area of work and identify where activities, expertise and people connect.
Creating one overview of a complex project
The Synergy Scope grew out of work by the JA PreventNCD Data Management Board to create a clearer overview of data being collected and generated across the project.
As that work progressed, it became clear that the same information could serve a much wider purpose. A shared overview could help partners identify related activities, recognise opportunities for coordination and make better use of expertise already available elsewhere in the consortium. A task force was therefore established to develop an interactive overview of activities across the Joint Action.
A first version of the Synergy Scope was developed in 2025 and became available within the project’s shared SharePoint environment in September that year. Its role has since evolved from providing an overview towards supporting more active coordination, data management and knowledge-sharing across JA PreventNCD.
For those responsible for coordinating activities across JA PreventNCD, having this central overview can provide a clearer picture of how the many different parts of the project fit together.
But the challenge is not only one of central coordination. At the other end of the spectrum, individual consortium members may have excellent knowledge of their own area while having much less visibility of related activities elsewhere.
In a consortium of this size, useful knowledge may already exist somewhere in the project without everyone who could benefit from it being aware of it.
The challenge is therefore not necessarily a lack of expertise or activity. It is making what already exists visible, findable and easier to connect.
Where do I start?
At its simplest, the Synergy Scope helps answer a common question in a project this large: where do I start?
You may want to know whether another team is working on a similar topic. You might need information about a pilot outside your own Work Package, want to see what activities are taking place in a particular country, or be looking for the person responsible for a specific task.
Perhaps you are preparing a deliverable, organising an event or exploring a possible collaboration and want to understand what related work is already taking place elsewhere in JA PreventNCD.
Without a shared overview, finding that information can depend on knowing the right person, searching through different project documents or contacting several colleagues before reaching the person or activity you need.
The Synergy Scope provides a central place to begin that search.
Users can explore activities across the Joint Action from different perspectives and move from a broad project overview towards the activities most relevant to them. The dashboard includes filtering by Work Package and intervention area, helping users navigate the large amount of information available across the project.
In practice, the Synergy Scope can help consortium members:
- understand what is happening beyond their own task or Work Package;
- explore activities taking place within a particular country or across countries;
- find relevant tasks, pilot activities and contacts;
- identify similar or complementary work elsewhere in the Joint Action;
- connect with expertise across Work Packages and workstreams;
- explore opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing; and
- reduce unnecessary duplication by making existing work easier to discover.
This is where overview can become synergy. Once people can see more clearly what others are doing, it becomes easier to spot connections, recognise shared challenges and find opportunities to work together.
The development of the Synergy Scope specifically aims to strengthen cross-Work Package collaboration and help identify overlapping goals, shared data needs and opportunities for joint implementation.
A tool designed to evolve with the project
JA PreventNCD is constantly developing, and the Synergy Scope is designed to develop with it.
Maintaining accurate and useful information is therefore an important part of the process. Work is ongoing to verify information, address gaps and ensure that activities across the consortium are represented as accurately as possible.
The tool also includes a feedback mechanism through which consortium members can submit suggestions, corrections or technical issues. This gives users a direct way to contribute to its continued development and helps ensure that improvements respond to practical needs within the project.
Further developments are also being explored to make the Synergy Scope even more useful. These include visual timelines to support coordination of activities, links to more detailed project documentation and tailored visual overviews responding to the needs of different groups within JA PreventNCD. Work is also underway to develop cross-cutting theme dashboards, providing an easier overview of tasks and activities related to areas such as alcohol, tobacco and nicotine, physical activity and dietary behaviour.
The aim is for the Synergy Scope to remain a living resource, rather than a static snapshot of the project.
Turning visibility into collaboration
Large European collaborations bring together substantial knowledge and expertise. But their size can also make it harder for people to see the full picture.
The Synergy Scope provides JA PreventNCD with a practical way of addressing that challenge. By making activities and contacts easier to find across Work Packages, workstreams and countries, it can help partners make better use of knowledge that already exists within the consortium and identify connections that might otherwise remain hidden.
The approach may eventually have relevance beyond JA PreventNCD. Future plans include developing a public-facing version of the Synergy Scope and exploring how the model could support coordination, transparency and knowledge-sharing in other complex, multi-partner initiatives.
For now, however, its most important audience is the JA PreventNCD consortium itself.
The current Synergy Scope is available exclusively to JA PreventNCD consortium members through the project’s shared Teams/SharePoint environment. If you are part of the consortium, take a look beyond your own area of work, explore what is happening across the Joint Action and see where new connections might emerge.