University administrative staff fill diverse and essential roles and support the majority of university activities. Although they are frontline staff, their activities and daily challenges are often under-acknowledged. Universities are no longer involved solely in education and research, but also take on roles in decision-making processes, hubs for industry, think tanks, etc. This leads to a variety of processes and knowledge, thus inspiring the need to harvest, share, and measure this body of knowledge. In addition, internationalization is at the core of most universities’ strategy and related activities are believed to lead HEIs to international renown. This goes hand in hand with demands for quality in education, research, services, and management. In this context, the emergence of new tasks and the need for new competencies/skills oblige universities to (re)train permanent staff, or to rely on competencies-based recruitment. Given this context, Peer-IR-View has two main objectives: i) preserve knowledge at the university- and consortium-level in the field of International Relations (IR) by developing knowledge management tools, and ii) gain the skills necessary for efficient internationalization by developing a peer-assistance system in order to retain and improve the quality of activity and project management. Both objectives share an imperative of self- and peer-assessment of actions and strategies, which have been taken for granted for the last 30 or so years. Peer-IR-View will improve the capacity of International Relations Offices (IRO) by developing IR competence and preserving IR knowledge, thus building new skills and capabilities to support the necessary organisational transformations, to meet expectations from funding bodies, and to improve knowledge retention. It let IR experts improve the capacity of IROs to overcome their challenges. The strategic alliance consists of 7 universities from Finland, Poland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. Project partners share a similar identity and common characteristics: they are small to medium size, "human scale" institutions often in the shadows of other larger institutions of the same country. They have a strong territorial anchoring and applied research orientation. They face the challenge of international attractiveness and have an important responsibility towards local students. With Peer-IR-View, partners strengthen a new European network of resilient institutions aiming at the development of high-level professional skills and a transparent, cooperative and non-competitive model of collaboration. The project will implement the following activities: The Knowledge Management toolkit (O1) is a set of tools to support efficient and effective sharing of knowledge. It will ensure knowledge continuity on projects and activities and so maintain their quality, thus reducing the effect of employee turnover. O1 will operate with a diversity of stakeholders to spread the internationalization imperative among diverse institutional structures. It will code, organise and transmit knowledge in order to guarantee the common understanding of international(isation) activities while working with core project stakeholders. The Peer-assist methodology (O2) is an assessment methodology and materials for evaluating partners’ activities. It will provide a method to review and assess partners’ activities and spot the challenges experienced and propose some improvements. Peer-assist will act as a mechanism to help prioritize what is carried out, the tasks and actions that should be developed, and to make partners aware of each and everyone's activities. It will act as a quality standard by giving meaning to IRO activities and a tool to compare different performances in a cooperative manner. The Peer-IR-School is designed to test the Peer-IR-View methodology by inviting external participants to learn and discuss the assessment methodology, as well as to understand the concept and application of O1 and O2 and to apply them to mock situations. Globally, Peer-IR-View project activities can easily be transferred and adapted to other structures within an organization. The knowledge and practice of the tools and techniques will be available in each institution as each partner institution will have practitioners. Guidelines will be developed for helping other partners to reuse and implement them in their own institution. The project will allow for a re-definition of IROs and their tasks, based on efficient and cost-effective expert assessments performed in-house and/or by partners. In the context of the next Erasmus program (2021-2027), the year 2020 appears to be a year of transition and there is no better way to prepare for the quantitative and qualitative leap expected from 2021 than to strengthen the actors directly involved in the management of European funds.
By implementing this project, the consortium wanted to enable IROs in higher education to take a step back from their activities, analyse their needs and develop tools to meet them collaboratively. As the 7 universities in the consortium are also members of the EUNICE European University, in which International Relations (IR) are central, this project has strengthened the bonds between the teams, as well as the use of common tools and working methodologies. The project has also provided answers to questions linked to the evolution of tasks and skills in the IR field, and the impact on universities and their staff training strategies. The development of peer-assistance systems to improve the quality of activity and project management in IROs helped to identify the lack of specific training in universities in this increasingly demanding sector. One of the initial objectives was achieved: to gain a better understanding of the challenges involved in preserving knowledge at local and consortium level, maintaining IR expertise and knowledge retention strategies.
The objective of this application was based on the analogy of the International Relations Office (IRO) iceberg. Peer-IR-view highlights the "hidden face" of this iceberg. Indeed, today, HEIs and IROs are faced with an internationalization imperative, a multiplication of knowledge and an increase in mobility, project and funding opportunities, which together make up the "visible face" of the iceberg. However, this reality is linked to other aspects that Peer-IR-view has attempted to address, such as the quality imperative, the lack of resources and frequent staff turnover, international activities and the dispersal of knowledge (i.e., the "hidden face" of the iceberg). As a result, intellectual outputs (IO) aim, on the one hand, to maintain and optimize knowledge within IROs but also within a consortium and, on the other hand, to maintain the quality of project management and activity execution by promoting the creation of a common knowledge pool and better internationalization of partner HEIs. The simultaneous creation of the EUNICE alliance in 2020 also motivated the submission of the application.