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…a deceptively simple question that can be interpreted in several ways.

For purposes of planning your proposed research study, answering the question (read: assessing feasibility) means looking at your idea from three perspectives—scope, cost, and time.

The scope of your project defines your project’s boundaries and outlines its major characteristics. A well thought-out statement of scope contains:

• Your idea and a justification for why you are proposing it,
• A list of the resources your project will need (includes equipment, supplies, space, people, etc.)
• The project’s constraints or limitations, and
• What the project will include and what it will NOT include.

The next logical question is what will your project cost? A rough estimate is sufficient. You will fine-tune costs when you develop the budget. Examples of costs include:

• Personnel (a later blog will discuss ways to predict personnel needs based on your study design),
• Equipment and supplies,
• Obtaining/storing specimens,
• Recruiting and retaining participants,
• Purchasing large sets of data,
• Experimental animals, and
• Lab tests

Here is a checklist of possible cost items for a proposal to the NIH. You will likely include similar items in budgets for proposals to other funding agencies.

The final piece of assessing feasibility is time. Again, a rough estimate is sufficient. How long will completing each major element–e.g., recruiting participants; conducting experiments, tests, interventions; completing interviews–of your research study take (weeks, months)? Can/will you do any or all elements simultaneously (in parallel) or complete one before starting another (in series)? How will the work play out along a time continuum? How much total time (years) will you need to complete the proposed study?

None of the three feasibility factors is unlimited and each one has implications for the other two. Scope, cost, and time exist in a dynamic relationship, and there is always tension among them. Changing one will affect one or both of the others. Think of a triangle with each side representing one of the factors. If you expand the scope (read: scope creep), time and cost are changed. If your proposal is funded for less than the actual costs, the scope will likely need to change to stay within budget. If you need to compress the time, you may need to add personnel, purchase supplies earlier than planned, or take other actions that will increase the cost.

Assignment designed to help you assess the feasibility of your project:

Imagine you are presenting your project idea to a panel of people who control the $$$. Either write a short document or develop a brief PowerPoint presentation that covers the following areas:

• What is your idea and what is your justification for proposing it? (1 paragraph each, or a single slide with key points)
• How many people will you need and why? (1 short paragraph or a single slide)
• What other resources (big ticket items) will you need? (Short list)
• Your rough estimate of the costs. (Single statement)
• Your best estimate of how much time you will need to complete the work. (Single statement)

Your document should be a single page, or if you choose to do a PowerPoint, it should be no longer than 3 slides. Use your document or your presentation to engage colleagues, co-investigators, experts, mentors, and other stakeholders in a conversation regarding feasibility. Note comments, concerns, and questions, and figure out how you will address them. Iterate until you feel confident your proposal is feasible.

Next Post: Researchers–Start Your Timelines

Previous Posts:

1. #*@*! Plan Is Not a Four-Letter Word
2. Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials

NIH information for grant authors prompts researchers to ask these questions as they describe innovation:

• Does the application challenge and seek to shift current research or clinical practice paradigms by utilizing novel theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions?
• Are the concepts, approaches or methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions novel to one field of research or novel in a broad sense?
• Is a refinement, improvement, or new application of theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies, instrumentation, or interventions proposed?

[Acing Your Aims includes a checklist for whether your aims meet these goals.]

The translation of these answers into a grant section often falls flat in dense paragraphs of text. Consider these tips to produce a “novel” innovation section.

1) Quote NIH back to your reviewers and connect the dots.

Here’s a real example when told cohort methods are not innovative though no cohorts exist:

NIH evaluation criteria for innovation speak directly to the value of shifting “current research or clinical practice paradigms” using novel theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies. Relatively neglected areas may be at a disadvantage if we don’t recognize the importance of laying the correct foundation. If a foundation is missing, as it is in research on fibroids and reproduction, then the novelty and value of a large, community-recruited prospective cohort is immense.

2) Bullet the key innovations to extract them from dense text format and better underscore the length of the list of new elements you are bringing to the science:

We will be the first to:

• Translate the use of an oscillation overthruster into clinical use.
• Create intermediate vector bosons from the annihilation of electrons.
• Extend this annihilation to the electron antimatter counterpart, positron.
• Travel through solid tumor matter.
• Achieve pineal tumor destruction in the eighth dimension.
• Disseminate this approach to guide research on other tumor types.
• Return funding to NIH because we’re just that good.

Verbs help convey the action even for Buckaroo Banzai.

3) Cite or provide brief excerpts from prominent texts or guidance from professional organizations that currently rely on incomplete information or biased study designs and methods. Go cautiously but it can be done gently:

Trusted sources and text books continue to report an association with pregnancy loss and support potential myomectomy to reduce miscarriage risk, in the absence of rigorous scientific evidence.[refs – case must be made in significance] This cohort will provide the largest prospective cohort to address the association of fibroids with miscarriage and has the potential to challenge an existing paradigm and reduce unnecessary surgical intervention. [See how we slipped rigor in there?]

4) Note those calling for your research:

The 2020 vision statement of the Association to Cure Everything specifically calls for exploration of new dimensions as an approach to providing therapeutics through alternate realities.

As the RFA underscores, potential for gene-by-drug analyses to reduce harms is substantial.

5) Go wild and keep the reviewers’ attention with a quote or clinical vignette:

On disrupting dogma:

As Mark Twain described: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

On why we need answers:

John Whorfin was dead on arrival to the emergency room after spending $100k. [ref] He is among more than 2,000 cases of individuals harmed by illicit oscillation overthruster use this year. Cancer is a devastating diagnosis and the public will continue to pursue extreme options. Our purpose is to translate this cutting-edge technology into a viable, safe, and affordable clinical tool.

Pure bragging:

Latin for innovation means “to renew or change”. RFTS fibroids data is well along the path to changing how we understand the role of fibroids in pregnancy. The proposed expansion of the cohort will speed us along.

Remember you are marketing your ideas. Give your pitch to colleagues, family and friends until the innovation and value-proposition are clear in plain language.

As a manager for our career development programs, many questions I get from trainees and faculty can actually be answered by using NIH RePORTER.  You can find out all kinds of nosy things like:

• Who else on campus has the kind of grant I’m writing (so I can ask if they’d share a copy)?
• Who else in the country does exactly the kind of science I’m doing?
• How many grants does my NIH institute fund each year?
• Which grants did the study section I’m aiming for fund in the last several years?
• Who on campus has VA grants (VA grants are now part of RePORTER)?

(Note to trainees: Not that I mind answering your questions.  But it’s probably faster to search yourself.)

First, you’ll need to visit the site.  You’ll find a form where you can search by

• PI name
• Organization
• City, State, or Congressional District
• Project number (including parts of numbers, so for example you can retrieve a list of all R01s in the nation or at a particular institution)
• NIH institute
• Study section

And more.  At the top, you can also choose whether to search only for current (“active”) projects or grants whose funding period ended up to 20 years ago.

Say you’re writing one of those fancy new R61 grants for exploratory research and you want to know if anyone else on your campus has one.  You can find out!  Let’s take Vanderbilt for an example.  I’ll type “Vanderbilt” into the organization field, and “R61” into the application number field.

Guess what?  There is someone on campus who has one of these grants.

If I click on the title, I can see the grant abstract.  By using the “Details” tab at the top, I can view things like the project start and end date, funding for this fiscal year, study section and program officer.  The “Similar Projects” tab provides a list of NIH funded grants that have similar key words, while “Results” links to papers produced from work funded by the grant.

You can run this same kind of search by any of the other criteria on the form, including a text search that combs abstracts and key terms provided by the PI.  (You’ll want to be specific in your terms, though.  “Cancer” gets you 22,870 results.  Maybe you have time to sift through them all, but I sure don’t.)

Want RePORTER to read your mind, or at least your conference abstract?  Try the “Matchmaker” tab at the top of the search form.  You can paste in a chunk of text up to 15,000 characters—that’s pretty much a paper right there, but you can use abstracts, drafts of your aims, heck, maybe you’ve tweeted something you want to search for—and Matchmaker will analyze it for key terms and spit out the 100 most closely related projects, listing them in order from most to least similar.  HOLY COW.

If you go to the “Quick Links” tab at the top and choose “Funding Facts” or “NIH Data Book,” your brain will soon explode from all the funding data NIH is about to shove in it.

Want to know the success rate last year for K08s at any institute or the NIH as a whole?  The total amount of funding that was available for new R01’s in each of the last five years?  Funding Facts has all this and more, including info on F awards.

The Data Book will not only give you that information, but it gives it to you in GRAPHIC FORM.  For example, here’s the R01 success rate:

You can get it in table format by clicking on the “Data” tab.

The Data Book also has super-cool charts and figures on success rates and awards by new investigator status, gender, MD vs. PhD, and other criteria.

NIH RePORTER: Learn it, love it, use it.  Be nosy.  Be informed.

You’ve decided that maybe a plan for doing your grant submission is a good idea. Check! But how to start?

Here are four concepts (borrowed from the project management profession) to help you get started: 1) assessing feasibility, 2) timelines, 3) milestones, and 4) work breakdown.

Assessing feasibility answers the deceptively simple question: Can this project really be done? To answer it realistically requires consideration of three factors—1) scope, 2) cost, and 3) time. More on these three important considerations and their relationships in the here.

Here’s an example of a timeline.

The second concept from project management is the timeline. It shows how work on the project plays out along a time continuum. To the left is one example of a timeline; others are here and here. You will find in-depth information on timelines, including how to set yours up here.

Once you have a timeline, you need to populate it with events and tasks. The first events you will add are milestones. These are key events in the project that tell you whether you are proceeding as planned. The submission date for your grant proposal is an example of a milestone, but there are others to consider. You will find help to identify milestones for your grant submission here.

The final concept is work breakdown. This is exactly what it sounds like—breaking a large amount of work into smaller, more-doable pieces. How to create buckets of work and associated tasks and activities is detailed here and here. Completing the work breakdown positions you to finish populating your timeline, at which point, voilà! You have a plan!

Your assignment

Assemble the following materials:

• A large sheet of flip chart paper, preferably not one with the sticky adhesive at the top
• At least 10 different colors of 2 by inch or 2 by 1 ¾ inch sticky notes (like Post-it notes)
• A long straight edge to draw lines for your timeline (a yard stick works well)
• A chart marker with a medium-sized point

Next Post: Can You (Really) Do Your Proposed Study?

Previous Post: #*@*! Plan Is Not a Four-Letter Word

Writing a grant proposal? Do you have a plan for how you will get it written, reviewed, and submitted on time?

A PLAN? Yes, a plan.

What can a plan do for you? A plan will:

• Eliminate your running around with your hair on fire trying to meet the submission deadline.
• Avoid creating emergencies for other people involved in getting your proposal submitted.
• Give you the whole picture of what needs to be done.
• Keep you focused and on track.
• Help you manage your available time.
• Reduce your stress.
• Organize your work so you can engage others in assisting you.
• Endear you to others (e.g. administrative and finance officers, your mentors, your colleagues, your co-investigators) who help you with your submission.

So what’s not to like? What’s that you say? Too much to do and you don’t have time to develop a plan? Don’t know how? Actually, the busier you are, the more you NEED an organized approach (read: plan).

Developing a plan requires a couple of things: 1) a desire to do it, and 2) some basic skills and techniques in project planning. You’re on your own for the desire part, but in my blog next week I will talk about project planning and introduce four basic concepts that will help you pace yourself for your grant submission. This will be followed by a weekly series of more in-depth blogs about each concept and its application to writing a proposal.

Your assignment, should you decide to accept it:

1. Decide on the funding agency, and opportunity, to which you intend to apply
2. Visit their website and get acquainted with their submission process
3. Determine deadlines for submission and decide when you plan to submit

Next Post: Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials

All research proposals – grants, dissertations, internal funding – must ace the description of aims.  Many scientific questions are interesting.  Not all are useful.  You must persuade your readers that the proposed aims/hypotheses to be tested and the related analysis will fill gaps in scientific knowledge.

Together with a thoughtful synthesis of the literature, this worksheet will help you determine if you can justify excitement about your aims for observational studies (cohorts, case-control, etc).  Interrogation of your aims will force you to clearly identify the claims you can make for exactly how you will be advancing the science if allowed to do the proposed research.

Be brutally honest with yourself in this evaluation. Your readers and reviewers are certain to be.  If you can’t defend at least one strong “Yes, I am using a superior approach to get this answer” per aim, re-think the aim. You may be lost in the land of incremental contributions and not distinctive progress.

Once you have a grid documenting powerful aims, this approach will help you tell others, in an organized way, why doing the proposed research is important, has significance in your field, and will bring innovative contributions into play. They’ll see you are on the path to discovery.