1. Kick off meeting
ARACHNE PROJECT

2. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A

3. Project overview Objectives:
« Project ARACHNE aims at establishing a comprehensive and complete database of projects impletemented under the Structural Funds in Europe and to enrich the data with publicly available information in order to identify, based on a set of risk indicators, the most risky projects. »
Objectives:
To develop, test and implement a risk scoring tool which facilitates the continuous monitoring of internal and external data regarding beneficiaries.
This tool shall:
promote the use of a risk based approach in the planning of the verification of projects, the audit of projects and selection of projects;
complement the risk assessment as regards fraud and irregularities in a consistent way throughout the EU;
identify irregular circumstances on a continuous basis on the basis of pre defined risk criteria in internal and external data regarding beneficiaries;
provide guidance to Member States on risk indicators and internal controls;
build up an overall better defence against fraud and errors.

4. GET Application Server
Project overview
Member States
DIGIT
GET Application Server
Operational Data
Operational Data
GET database
SFC2007
Vadis
European Commission
Member States
Operational Data
GET database
Orbis
World Compliance
Web mining

5. Project overview – Risk testing categories
Test category
Description
Ratio analysis
Study undertaken to assess the financial strengths and weaknesses (such as distribution of costs over cost categories) of the project and its operating trend compared to the averages.
Sanity checks
Basic checks on logicality and reasonability of project data.
Cross checks
Cross-project and cross-operating programme checks.
Performance checks
Assessment of wheter or not predefined goals were met.
Financial alerts
Overall financial performance of beneficiaries and (sub)contractors, based on financial reporting data
Relationship alerts
Relationships between beneficiaries or (sub)contractors, and the people involved in them.
Reputation alerts
Involvement in locations or activities (such as prior bankruptcies) that could possible result in reputational damages.
Sanction alerts
Identification of beneficiaries, (sub)contractors or people involved in them, that are blacklisted or appear on any type of sanction list.
Change alerts
Identify any type of changes to the company structure.
Negative info alerts
Identification of any other negative information made available through text and web mining.

6. Project overview – main functionalities
Data upload from Member States through SFC2007 web services
Feed-back loop management system
Data enrichment at Vadis (Orbis, WorldCompliance, web mining)
Risk score calculation based on internal and external data
Output visualisation in a dashboard
High risk beneficiaries / projects
Drill-down functionalities
Visualisation of links between entities/individuals
Scenario analysis
Export options
Report management system
Case management
User management

7. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A

8. Scope and project team Scope:
Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMLP) and Directorate-General for Regional Policy (DG REGIO)
European Social Fund, European Regional Development Fund, Cohesion Fund. (it should be noted that for the ERDF and CF, a maximum of 60 OP’s or/and 60 Managing Autorities will be selected for the Risk Scoring Tool)

9. Scope and project team Steering Committee Quality Assurance Team
Service Delivery Manager
System owner
Technical Project Manager
Functional Project Manager
Business manager
Quality Assurance Team
User representatives
Quality Assurance & Issue Manager
DIGIT
Deployment and configuration team
Analysis and design team
Development team
Test team
Technical documentation & trainings team

10. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A

11. Project Planning
1/1/’12
1/7/’12
1/1/’13

12. Project Planning -deliverables
Milestone *
Deliverable
12 January 2012
DLV 0-1 : Signed minutes of the kick-off meeting with attached the Project Quality Plan and Test Strategy Plan
19 March 2012
DLV 1-1 : Functional design report
DLV 1-2 : Test scenario’s
04 April 2012
DLV : Operational SFC2007 interfaces
21 May 2012
DLV 2-1 : Performance and accessibility testing report
03 July 2012
DLV : Centralized data of the Member States
30 July 2012
DLV 3.2-1: Acceptance testing report basic prototype dashboard
DLV 3.2-2: Basic working prototype of the dashboard (release 1)
14 August 2012
DLV : Risk scoring output per Member State
25 September 2012
DLV : Activity report on Member State setup
18 October 2012
DLV : Acceptance testing report full working prototype dashboard
DLV : Full working prototype of the dashboard (release 2)
29 November 2012
DLV 5-1 : User manuals in English and French
DLV 5-2 : Training materials
7 March 2013
DLV 6-1 : Minutes of project closing meeting
* The dates above are listed in our proposition under the presumption that a kick off meeting would take place on January 11th, As the kick off meeting did not take place on that date, the dates will change accordingly.

13. Project Planning – test & acceptance approach
Extreme Programming (XP) methodology
Development environment and production environment
Functional tests
Technical tests
Performance tests
Final metrics will be determined during the functional design meeting.
A T1/T2/T3 review cycle will be applied for this project:
T1 refers to the time needed by the European Commission (e.g. 20 working days) to report findings/incidents (if any) on the deliverable;
T2 refers to the time needed by the Vadis project team (e.g. 10 working days) to provide its position on the findings reported by the European Commission, find an agreement and implement the resolutions. The adapted deliverable is then delivered for a final round of acceptance testing (Iteration 2).
T3 refers to the time needed by the European Commission (e.g. 10 working days) to deploy & verify the correct implementation of the corrections.  Once the deliverable is found to be conforming to the acceptance criteria, it will be approved by the European Commission for acceptance.

14. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A

15. Assumptions and responsibilities
The Member States will be responsible for the development of system queries that generate xml files which meet the requirements, the providing of data and the validation of the output.
The Member States will be responsible for the quality and accuracy of their data.
The communication with the Member States during the on-boarding, discussions on data format/quality, end user validation and roll out will to a large extend be organized remotely.
The availability of following people to the project team is ensured by the European Commission:
Central auditors;
Representatives of Operational Programs / Member States;
IT department;
The user requirements will be considered as final after the functional design phase.
Acceptance testing will be performed on the data of 1 Member State.
DIGIT will provide the required IT infrastructure.

16. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A

17. Next steps
Day-to-day contact person representing DG Employment and DG Regio
Contact person(s) representing the Member States
Announcement letters
Functional design workshops
Attendants
Contact details
Dates
List of managing authorities
Appointment of a ‘sponsoring’ managing authority
List of internal database of European Commission that can be included in the risk scoring (e.g. Central Exclusion Database)
DIGIT
Technical specifications SFC2007
Next meeting of the Steering Committee

18. Agenda Project overview Scope and project team Project planning
Assumptions and responsibilities
Next steps
Q&A