My team participates in all kinds of projects (large and small, at the european, national and regional level). All of them require me to spend countless hours in stupid paperwork (you know how this works, my team gets to do the enjoyable part, i.e. the actual research, while I fill spreadsheets:-) ). What, due to my relative inexperience, surprised me was to realize that the number of paperwork hours is not directly proportional to the money the team gets from the project. In fact, it looks much more like a logarithmic relationship.

logprojects

Which, in practice, means that even the smaller projects require a lot of paperwork. Moral of the story is “be smart and only care aim at big projects”.