Sprint

The Center for Evaluating Health Reform leverages innovative team processes to produce grant proposals and research papers. We believe that generating these products can be done more efficiently and effectively through grant and paper sprints. Learn more about the sprint method here.

Grant Sprints

After a request for proposals (RFP) has been identified, the research team meets over two consecutive days for a focused development of the proposal narrative. The process begins by reviewing the RFP and critiquing the research project designed to address the questions in the RFP. In this way, limitations can be identified and rectified or addressed. The team then moves to drafting the proposal. Individuals are assigned a section of the narrative and all write simultaneously. The sections are then passed to other members of the team for review. In this way, each section of the narrative has been revised by at least two members of the research team. Because the various sections of the proposal are being written concurrently and the focused nature of meeting, at the end of the sprint, the research team has produced a near-final (if not final) version of the proposal with only minor tasks remaining.

Paper Sprints

Paper sprints, like grant sprints, are focused meetings during which sections of a research paper are written concurrently by multiple members of a research team. In an initial planning sprint, the team will write the abstract, identify the analysis plan, identify the results we want to show and plan the next project steps. Then we spend one month performing the analysis according to the developed plans. Following analysis, the team meets to write the remaining portions of the paper in a 4-hour sprint.