Project Audits by Challenge Teams

INTRODUCTION

Project progress and finalization are measured by KPIs, progress reports and Zoom meetings. Although that works perfectly, it's based on trust of the team with no external and independent auditability of the outcomes delivered by the project.

With the existence of Challenge Teams from Fund 7 and that the initiative has been really successful so far, we have the perfect group to address the task. Since they already have the responsibility to track key metrics of funded projects, we can increase their duties with an incentive mechanism.

THE PROPOSAL

Give the challenge team the responsibility to audit externally completed projects of their corresponding challenge and come up with a brief report. They can perform this task by themselves or hire someone externally.

In compensation they will receive a fixed amount per project of approximately US$ 300 (see assumptions below)

WHAT ACTIVITIES INVOLVE AN EXTERNAL AUDIT

• understand project deliverables
• get into project KPIs, progress reports and close report
• finding proofs of the achieved outcomes declared: visiting a web page, a github repo, finding links in social media, etc.
• provide a final simple report with findings
• detect common patterns of untrackable achievements that can help improve future fundings

WHY IS IMPORTANT

• Empowering challenge teams to keep an eye on funded projects while receiving an incentive for this follow up.
• Have a final external audit of achievements of closed projects
• Discover situations where deliverables are hard to track and find solutions for next fundings

THE EXPERIMENT

This proposal is conceived as an experiment for the first Challenge Teams of Fund 7. If it is funded and gives us good results it can be extended in the future.

THE BUDGET

Estimating that each external audit process costs US$300 and that 150 projects will be funded in Fund 7, the total budget for this project is US45.000.

The author of this project won't receive any funding, since all funding should go to challenge teams.

TRACKING PROGRESS

The success of the initiative should be tracked by the following metrics and analysis:

• Number of audit reports
• Quality of audit reports: provide useful information? can we obtain valuable conclusions to improve the process?
• Time elapsed from project completion to delivery of audit report
• Retrospective survey from Challenge Team: is it a easy/hard task? find it useful? incentive was correct?

THE BIO

This proposal was elaborated by Rodolfo Miranda. His Linkedin profile can be find at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodolfomiranda/

His background includes a MS EE degree at Stanford University and more than 25 years of successful work experience in both large multinational companies and owned startup projects. His main activities involve architecting, developing, and implementing large scale software solutions for the Telecommunication Industry. He leads multi-disciplinary and multinational teams in the Caribbean and Latin America.

More than 40 years of self-taught programming with advanced knowledge on many coding languages. Lately, he was engaged in blockchain technologies and joined Cardano community where he:

• Submitted and received funding for his proposal in Fund 6: https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Interoperability-as-growth-driver/368705-48088
• Delivered a DIF side-tree implementation on top of Cardano: https://github.com/rodolfomiranda/sidetree-cardano
• Participated as Community Advisor in Fund 6
• Is part of the Challenge Team for Fund 7 challenge "Grow Latinamerica, Grow Cardano"
• Is part of the first cohort of the Atala Prism Pioneer Program