The power of a good story (and that all-important ‘However…’ clause)

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it.”

So said a chap named Tyrion Lannister who, my internet tells me, is a character from a TV programme called Game of Thrones. And he’s right, I reckon, at least when it comes to grant applications. Sure, many funders state that the overriding factor they use when they make funding decisions is the excellence of the science, and indeed the science in your proposal (assuming it’s in a scientific area of research) will definitely need to be first-rate. But to grab the reviewers’ attention and sell them your science over and above the other competing proposals, you’ll need to embed your description of it within a very clear and compelling story. A story that explains very clearly what the point of doing that science is – why it really matters, and how we stand to benefit from it.

 

When I was in primary school, I was taught that stories are like fish. They have a beginning (the head), a middle (the body) and an ending (the tail). I’m not sure whether the extent of my English teacher’s knowledge of piscine anatomy would stand up to close scrutiny, but I like the idea of identifiable key components without which a story is incomplete.

In the case of a research proposal – certainly the types of life-science proposal with which I’m most familiar – I’d suggest that the story will often break down into the following components:

The ‘problem’ statement

An identifiable problem, which could be a gap in current scientific knowledge and/or a ‘real-world’ challenge relating to society, public health, wellbeing or whatever.

An explanation of why the problem is important – its size, nature, severity and impact on the people whom it affects.

The ‘current state of the art’ overview

A description of where we are now in this area of science and its application – what we already know and can do, and how that has had benefits to date for the scientific field and for the domain of real-world impact on which the proposal is focused (for example, using blood biomarkers for cancer diagnosis). Wherever possible and appropriate, it's very valuable to be able to point to some promising preliminary data that sits at the cutting edge of the science. 

The ‘however’ clause

This is critical – it’s fundamental to justifying why the proposed research needs to be done. Great and highly promising though the current science may be, this is the big ‘but’. A description of what we don’t yet know, what we can’t yet do, that prevents us from achieving so much more in this particular scientific area. If only we could move the field on…

The ‘leap forward’ description

Having prepared the ground by setting out the above points in clear terms, this component of the story is a vital part of the jigsaw – a description of a novel and compelling idea for moving forward, overcoming the current obstacles, plugging the knowledge gap and advancing the field. The aforementioned preliminary data often plays a critical role in giving credence to this novel idea. 

The ‘impact’ promise

Just outlining the problem is not enough – here we state specifically how and to what extent we will address the problem. Scientific leaps forward are great, and in an ideal world we’d fund them all just for the sake of curiosity and the notion that producing new knowledge is a worthwhile end in itself. But funding and resources are limited, so without wishing to sound too grand we need to select those proposals that promise most benefit for mankind. Specificity is the watchword here – what, exactly, do you intend will change as a result of the research?

In an applied proposal, you will be describing things like new practices, new processes, new guidelines, changed policies, perhaps new products (for example drugs or medical devices). They don’t have to change or come into being directly on conclusion of your project, but you’ll need to describe how the project will advance the status quo towards those changes ultimately being realised.

In a fundamental-science proposal, much or all of the immediate impact is likely to be academic. So in the life sciences at least, you’ll probably be describing how the new knowledge you deliver will support and advance the work of other scientists who are undertaking impactful research in specific areas.

And did I mention specificity?

The ‘timeliness’ reinforcement

Why do this research now? If it’s such a good and promising idea then why has no one done it before? And even if it couldn’t have been done until now, is it really so urgent? This component of the story explains why your idea’s time has come (perhaps the technology just didn’t exist a few years ago) and describes, without hyperbole, why the work must now be done without delay (perhaps the important problem you have identified is escalating rapidly).

The remit reminder

This is a focused explanation of why, specifically, the funder should care about all this. Every funder has a remit area and strategy for supporting research, and as much as something may be of general concern to the world as a whole, if it’s not within a funder’s remit then their interest in it will be limited. It may well seem abundantly obvious by this stage that the proposed research and its intended impact will fall within the funder’s remit, but spell it out clearly for the reviewers. This part of the story should refer to specific elements of the funder’s mission, remit and strategic focus, and explain explicitly and convincingly why and how the proposed research will support these.

Building the story

You won’t necessarily assemble these key components in the same order as above and they won’t all necessarily be self-contained chunks of narrative – some may serve as a thread that permeates the proposal as a whole. But in the life sciences at least, the majority of strong proposals are likely to be underpinned by all or at least most of these basic components.

There are of course other components to the story. You’ll note, for example, that I’ve barely touched above on the scientific detail and methodology, and of course without these you don’t have a research proposal. But, for our purposes here, this aspect of the proposal is all actually – believe it or not – largely secondary. It sits adjacent to the ‘why bother?’ story, and its purpose is to establish the credibility of your big idea. Anyone can say they’ll change the world, but if they propose to do so by witchcraft and magic alone then they may not be taken very seriously by those who hold the purse strings.

It’s no coincidence that the storyline building blocks I’ve outlined above would underpin a strong lay summary. I maintain that in the life sciences at least, it should probably be possible to boil down almost every research proposal to a handful of clear, strong statements from which my daughter (who is in Year 7) would grasp the essence of what the proposal is trying to achieve and understand why that matters in the real world.

This story-based narrative provides a central framework upon which to hang many of the essential parts of a research proposal. An overarching aim, for example, will be framed with clear reference to the problem you have identified and how you seek to address it. The main hypothesis and research questions will address the particular gaps in knowledge that you have identified, and the research objectives will outline the specific steps you will take to achieve the project’s aim. Drilling down further to the methodological detail, the description of this should be organised in such a way as to explain in practical terms how you will achieve each of your research objectives.

So: Get the work-plan done and you’ll achieve your objectives. Achieve the objectives and you should deliver against your aim. Accomplish the aim and you’ll have made an impact against the problem. Which we already know is important, matters to the funder, and needs to be tackled now.

There are usually other parts to the story that need telling, some of which may be peripheral but all of which are nevertheless important in their own right. How, for example, will you archive and share your data? What concrete steps will you take to maximise impact? If you’re applying for a fellowship then there’s a second story to tell that’s as important as the story behind the project – one about you and your motivation, your long-term career plans, and why fellowship funding is essential for realising your full potential as a researcher.

A real example – a great story in action

Below is an example of a grant that was funded a few years ago by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The project’s title, The ‘Medical Bypass’: a new treatment for obesity and diabetes’, gives a strong hint as to what the story is about. You can read a bit more about the research on UKRI’s Gateway to Research (GtR) website, but in a nutshell:

Obesity is an important problem (it affects one in four people in the UK, and it’s getting worse). It’s a major cause of diabetes and other serious diseases. (The ‘problem’ statement, with a ‘timeliness’ reinforcement.)

We have just one anti-obesity drug, which is not very effective. We do though have gastric bypass surgery, which works well for treating obesity and diabetes. (The ‘current state of the art’ overview.)

But gastric bypass is expensive, irreversible and not without risk, having a 1 in 300 mortality rate. (The ‘however’ clause.)

This research will set out to prove the concept of administering satiety hormones (part of our body’s signalling mechanism that tells us when we’re full) to achieve similar results to a surgical bypass. (The ‘leap forward’ description.)

Ultimately, the goal of the research is to develop an effective treatment for obesity and diabetes that is safe and cost-effective. Without such treatments, obesity levels in the UK are projected to reach 50% plus by 2050. (The ‘impact’ promise, plus more timeliness.)

The short information provided on the GtR website doesn’t explicitly include a remit reminder. It does though describe how the research, which was to be done using rats, was designed to justify a trial of the proposed ‘medical bypass’ approach in overweight patients. This, together with the focus area of the project (treatments for obesity and diabetes), leaves us in no doubt that the research is squarely within MRC’s remit. If the research had been of a more fundamental-science nature then a strong and explicit remit statement would probably have been essential.

The research itself involved measuring levels of gut hormones – peptide YY(PYY), glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and oxyntomodulin (OXM), and a good description of the project's science would have been absolutely essential for enabling the reviewers to evaluate the credibility of the idea and assess the quality and feasibility of the project. But while the science might well have been the part of the proposal that interested the applicant most, it’s worth noting that it barely features within the central ‘good story’ that makes a compelling case for funding the project and getting the science done.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.

Something boring that everyone hates (Justification of resources)

Justification. Of. Resources. Surely three of the most hated words in academia, right up there with ‘key performance indicators’ and ‘increased teaching load’. Such a dull thing to write about, and what on earth to write anyway? Is it not utterly obvious why you need an ELISA instrument and three litres of blocking-buffer solution? Anyway, there’s so little time left before the deadline, and you still haven’t finished editing the Case for support. And you’ve been working on this grant pretty-much solidly for the last two months. I feel your pain.

 

And yet. Funders want to get maximum bang for their research-funding buck, so value for money is often right up there with scientific excellence and impact potential when it comes to assessing a proposal and deciding whether or not to fund it. Indeed, it’s inextricably linked. In their guidance for reviewers, for example, the Medical Research Council sets out just three core assessment criteria – importance; scientific potential; and value for money, on which they ask the following question:

Resources requested: are the funds requested essential for the work, and do the importance and scientific potential justify funding on the scale requested? Does the proposal represent good value for money?

To take another example, the peer-review template that BBSRC reviewers are asked to complete includes the following question:

Value for money

Please comment on the value for money of the proposal.

Sure, some reviewers will only write a line or two here, particularly if they generally like the look of the proposal overall. But others will go into quite forensic detail, interrogating your budget almost on a line-by-line basis and maybe questioning the need for some of the things in it. Why risk exposing any vulnerabilities in your proposal, when just a little bit of extra effort would allay such concerns and head off the possibility of receiving potentially-damning criticism from reviewers?

Just to rewind slightly for a moment, I always emphasise the fact that putting together a sound research proposal consists of two distinct jobs: planning the project down to the last detail – the what, the when, the how, the who; and writing about the project in a manner that will sell it to a would-be funder. You should never try to do the second job before you’ve finished the first one. As well as making sure you actually have something to write about, this ‘plan it, then write about it’ approach has another clear advantage. When it comes to working out your budget, you should know exactly what you’re going to need in terms of resources (including people’s time, equipment, consumables and so on). You’ll have a very clear idea of the items of expenditure and the quantities involved, and of course you’ll have a sound understanding of exactly why you need them.

Justifying resources – the clue’s in the name…

As a bid writer I quite regularly see ‘Justification of resources’ documents that are little more than lists. In effect, they just replicate the budget – a list of items the applicant claims are needed, and their cost. But they don’t explain why they’re needed.

Imagine auditing the schedule of costs for your new-build house. One of them is for ‘Dancing girls: £10,000’. On the face of it, the first thing you’d do would be to fire the builder and get in someone else who’s less intent on spending your cash on hedonistic frivolity. But wait – it’s a high-end build, and the design brief calls for ornamental statuary to decorate the courtyard. Had the builder only itemised this as ‘Life-size “dancing girl” stone statues for external ornamentation (courtyard; one for each corner) x4 @ £2,500 each: £10,000’ then you could have saved yourself the unnecessarily-raised blood pressure and an angry telephone call. Sufficient information to explain and justify costs puts suspicious minds at rest and pre-empts unnecessary queries.

How then to justify your costs properly and keep your reviewers firmly on side?

  

Step 1: Don’t miss anything out

The first step in convincing the wary reviewer that you really do need everything you’re requesting in your budget is to make sure you actually mention it in your justification. Once the budget’s finalised and locked down, go through it line by line and list everything that needs justifying. Some funders will tell you which costs do and don’t need to be justified – UKRI, for example, provides cross-Council guidance on the Je-S website. Some of the individual Research Councils also give guidance, for example this from EPSRC. If there’s no specific guidance from the funder, then it’s wise to justify pretty much everything, and definitely all directly-incurred costs (project-specific stuff like travel, consumables, and postdocs who are dedicated to the project), any equipment, and any directly-allocated costs (permanent-staff time, specialist facilities charges, and perhaps pool technicians). Your list will form the basis of your justification of resources, and because you based it on your finalised budget you won’t miss anything out.

Step 2: Set out your justification narrative clearly and intuitively

Reviewers know they have to look at your justification of resources so they can comment on the ‘value for money’ criterion, but most of them will enjoy doing so about as much as you enjoyed writing it. So make it easy for them. Group items under clear and logical sub-headings, and set everything out neatly and consistently. Use bold to enable them easily to pinpoint particular items. This may not be storytelling but it’s still narrative, so write clearly and completely and don’t lapse into barely-intelligible shorthand, text-speak or similar. The basics of sound grammar continue to apply. Do be sure to check and adhere to the funder’s procedural guidelines with regard to things like document length, word-count limit and font. Which of course you always do!  

Step 3: Explain clearly why you need stuff

And so we get to the part that really seems to exercise minds. Steps one and two only require a bit of organisation and attention to detail, but this final step is the one that’s right up there with pulling teeth for many of us. Yet the truth is that if you can’t justify something in your budget convincingly to someone else then you simply don’t need it.

To return to my house-building analogy, consider the following costs: bricks; slates; copper finials; Ferrari.

 

On the face of it, the first two barely need justifying. Houses need walls and roofs, and bricks and slates are as good a material as any for these purposes. But actually, as a scrupulous sort I’d want to check that the quantities of these are appropriate, and that I’m not shelling out for unnecessarily-expensive or otherwise-inappropriate types of brick and slate. So I might prefer to see something like:

Standard house bricks (215mm x 65mm) to build 15m x 12m two-storey house @118 bricks per m² of wall (double-leaf) with 5% overage allowance – 12,500 bricks 

Spanish roof slates (600mm x 300mm) for 240m² roof @13 slates per m2 (390mm overlap) with 10% overage allowance – 3,430 slates

If you’re a quantity surveyor or a builder then please don’t examine my quantities here too carefully – no doubt they’re incorrect. But for our purposes, the above is clear and intelligible. It gives the sceptically-minded reader enough information to determine whether or not whoever wrote it is having a laugh, or making it all up on the hoof. And it does so in a way that’s understandable to the non-expert, without taking any sort of condescending tone that might irritate an expert reviewer.

The third item on our list above needs a bit more explanation. Copper what? But I commissioned a fairly ornate roof, and so the following extra detail would reassure me that it’s all legitimate:

Decorative copper roof finials (14 inch) for roof-ridge ends (x2) to ornament roof as specified

And what about the last item on the list? Well, no amount of explanation is likely to convince me that my house build requires the purchase of a Ferrari. It’s unjustifiable and so shouldn’t be in the budget. As such, it’s going to cause me to question whether I’ve picked the right builder to give my money to.

How all this translates to a research proposal

The safest approach is never to assume. Something that may seem so obvious to you as to need no explanation may not be at all clear to someone else, perhaps a reviewer from outside your immediate area of scientific specialism. Make clear why the item – and the quantity stated – is necessary for the project to go ahead as described in the proposal.

I won’t reproduce the UKRI guidance, but in short keep in mind that you’re answering the question why here. Why have you chosen that international conference? Why do four of you need to attend? Why will the project require 20% of your time (in other words, what specifically will you be doing in the project that would take that amount of time)? What particular skills, expertise and capacity will your co-investigators bring to the project, and how will they be deployed? Why do you need a postdoc for the whole of the project’s duration, and why do you need to recruit at that particular pay grade? Why will they need that high-end laptop? Why do you need those lab consumables – what specifically are they for and why is that necessary for the project?

The other key thing is to give a proper breakdown where appropriate. The sub-headings ‘Travel’ and ‘Lab consumables’ tell me very little on their own, for example, so simply giving a total figure for each of these isn’t going to be at all helpful to the critical reviewer. For travel, I’d want to know who’s travelling, where, how and for how long, so that I can judge whether the ‘why’ in the explanation seems reasonable and proportionate. Similarly, when it comes to lab consumables I’d want to know what exactly that sub-heading means – what specifically are they, how many of them are needed and how will they be used. Once again, this would enable me to judge whether the explanation of why they’re needed seems appropriate.

Some examples

Here are some examples, provided by the Natural Environment Research Council, of how to justify key items in a research-project budget:

Investigator effort: The PI will spend an average of 2.5 hours per week throughout the 36 months which will cover grant administration, guiding the PDRA in fluid inclusion analysis, and co-ordinating the research team. The Co-I effort varies: Co-I One will spend an average of 5 hours per week guiding the PDRA in microtextural techniques and data analysis, and contributing to project meetings. Co-I Two will spend an average of 7.5 hours per week training and guiding the PDRA in Ar/Ar dating, which encompasses sample preparation, the use of the laserprobe and noble gas mass spectrometry, data collection, data quality assessment, data reduction and presentation. Ar/Ar data interpretation is critically dependent on the measured sub-grains (from microtextural analysis) and microthermometry (from fluid inclusion analysis) and will involve modelling of the measured Ar/Ar data with respect to grain sizes and temperatures under the guidance of Co-I Two.

Conference attendance: We seek funding for conference attendance for the PDRA and investigators. This is essential for the international dissemination of results and to provide networking and career development opportunities for the PDRA. We have chosen AGU (San Francisco 2008) and Geofluids (Adelaide 2009), both of which will attract wide international audiences both in the specific fields of the proposal and more broadly.

Source: NERC; see the whole example Justification of resources here 

So to finish

Be aware that it can be as important to request sufficient resources, appropriate to your proposed approach and methodology, as it is to avoid requesting too much. An expert reviewer with relevant scientific experience will spot a project that’s under-resourced and will rightly be concerned that you’ll be unable to deliver.

A final point. We all know that, for various good reasons, putting together a research proposal is often a rush job. A good reviewer though will be looking out for projects that have been meticulously planned down to the last detail, leaving no stone un-turned. These tend to make for the best-written, clearest proposals, and a well-thought-through budget and accompanying justification are definitely hallmarks of a carefully-planned research project. By showing the reviewer that you’re on the case and have given due attention to detail you’ll be increasing your chances of success. Conversely, in a highly-competitive funding environment a poor justification of resources can be enough to kill an otherwise-decent proposal. So never let it be the ha’p’orth of tar for want of which the ship ends up being spoiled.


The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Deal or no deal? – The all-important PI response

For this month’s blog post I’ve resisted the temptation to write something about coronavirus. I think everyone’s hearing quite a bit about the ‘c-word’ right now, and there’s just a chance that some are getting a teensy bit fed up with it. So I decided instead to write about something that’s almost equally feared by those on the receiving end of it; grant reviewers’ feedback. As with certain other things, we know it’s coming sooner or later, and part of us just wants to get it over with. But at the same time, when it does finally arrive, we dread the moment when we’ll find out exactly what it’s like. Will it be mild, or severe?

Let’s pause for a moment and think about the purpose of the reviewers’ feedback, and of your response to it as the lead applicant on the proposal. (My focus here is on the UKRI peer-review system, but various other research-funding bodies operate in a similar way.) Peer reviewers will be asked to consider the importance, scientific potential and value for money of the proposed research. In doing so they’ll often raise some questions about points that aren’t clear to them, or where the detail seems insufficient, and they’ll make observations based on their perception of how the proposal stands up against the main evaluation criteria. Sometimes they’ll make suggestions as to how they think the project could be improved. If they’re in a really bad mood they might quibble with your punctuation or grammar. Based on their overall perception, they’ll give the proposal a score. It’s often fairly apparent from the nature and tone of the comments and the score awarded whether or not a reviewer thinks the proposal should be funded.

If a proposal receives unanimously poor reviews and low scores from reviewers, and it’s deemed to be beyond salvage, then it may get rejected before going to the full panel. This process helps to avoid the panel’s time being taken up with discussing and considering obvious no-hopers. Otherwise, the lead applicant gets a chance to provide the panel with their response to the reviews. This ‘PI response’ is the applicant’s last chance to boost their proposal’s prospects of success, and for the many proposals that fall into the ‘danger zone’ of not having garnered unreservedly positive reviews and maximum scores it’s a vitally important step in the application process (even proposals with rave reviews aren’t necessarily home and dry – the panel may consider the reviews to be unjustified, or may simply feel that in a highly-competitive round the proposal just isn’t a good strategic fit). All the indications are that a considered, well-written PI response can be the difference between success and failure.

Know your audience – who reads your PI response?

At the grants-committee meeting, panel members won’t look at your proposal in anything like as much detail as the peer reviewers did. They’ll focus mainly on the reviews, and definitely on the PI response to them, to inform their discussions and decision making. Two things to bear in mind here:

1. the panellists probably won’t be experts in your particular field – assume they’re not
2. they’ll have very little time available to discuss your proposal

So when you write your PI response, your primary audience will consist of time-pressed generalists who will have a great deal of business to get through. There’s a highly-important audience sub-category here too – the introducing or presenting member. Their own field of expertise is likely to be closer to yours, but not completely overlapping. They’re likely to have read your proposal in more detail than the other panel members, but they too will look closely at the reviews and your PI response. They’ll have to explain your proposal to rest of the panel, and suggest a score which is then up for discussion. Once again they’ll have a lot to get through, and not very much time.

A question of tone

So your peer reviews have all landed you don’t quite know what to think. They didn’t all hate it at least, which means you’re still in the game. But there are quibbles – some of them a bit left field – and Reviewer Two really did seem to be having a bad day. How to respond?

Probably the single most important thing to bear in mind at this stage is that all of the reviewers have given up their time and effort to review your proposal, in exchange for precisely no recompense. So you’re really grateful to them. No no, really. Even if you’re now thinking that Reviewer Two must be a complete coronavirus, you will take a deep breath, exhale slowly, adjust your face into a beatific smile and direct only kind-spirited thoughts towards your reviewers. The calm, Zen-like state into which you ascend will inform the tone of your response. And if you’re not quite there yet, sleep on it. Life nearly always feels like less of a trial after a good night’s sleep.

And you never know, some of the reviewers may just have a point – at least on the face of it. You only had a few pages in the Case for Support to describe a novel and complex project, and with a lot to try to cover it’s almost inevitable that some of the details fell by the wayside. What may have seemed obvious to you may well be much less obvious to the reviewer, who will certainly know much less about your project and its background. So you now have a chance to fill in the gaps for them, allay their concerns, and perhaps to acknowledge and take on board some good points that you hadn’t actually considered. Try not to see the process as adversarial then, but collaborative – you’re all trying together to make the proposal as robust as possible before it goes in front of the panel.

What follows is a suggested approach to constructing a PI response, along with some key points to bear in mind when you write it.

Constructing your response

First off, I’d recommend completing something of a content-analysis exercise. Going through each of the reviews, look for common themes – points and criticisms raised by more than one reviewer, indeed possibly all of them. Some of these may be easy to spot, some of them a little harder because the points raised by the respective reviewers may be related but not identical. Some of the points may be relatively minor and easily addressed, some may be more serious. You’ll be hoping that none of them are face-palm-inducing deal breakers, but you’ll certainly be looking out for criticisms that will kill the proposal if you don’t address them very convincingly. Rank the points as you find them, with the most serious – and/or hardest to address – points that have been raised by most or all of the reviewers at the top of your list. Once you have identified all the common points, continue working through each of the reviews picking out the points that you’ll need to address in your response and adding them to your ranked list. Be aware that it’s quite possible for a very important point to have been spotted by just one of the reviewers, perhaps because their own field of expertise is closest to the subject of the proposal.

One of the reasons for trying to rank the reviewers’ comments in terms of importance is that you only get a limited amount of space for your response. So it’s important to prioritise the allocation of space in your response document so that you can deal most comprehensively with the most serious points that have been raised. That said, it’s important to try to address all of the legitimate queries and criticisms raised by the reviewers.

When you’re sure you’ve listed all the points that need addressing, share your list with your fellow applicants, along with copies of the reviews themselves for context. Research proposals are always a team effort, and your PI response will be strengthened by the input of the other team members. The tone you adopt for your initial communication with the team will set the tone for their input, and there’s little to be gained from wasting time and emotional energy with a flurry of “how could anyone be so stupid!” emails.

If your proposal’s basically a good’un and the reviewers have done their jobs well, a fair number of their comments, observations and criticisms are likely to focus on the finer points of your science and your proposed methodological approach. Reviewers might also have some concerns about certain aspects of feasibility (can you really recruit all those participants, or get it all done in the available time?), or about how you plan to archive your data and make it available. Perhaps they don’t understand clearly enough exactly who will be doing what in the project. If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with grant applicants to draft their PI response, it’s that I definitely don’t know the answers to questions like these – it’s your project, so it’s over to you. But what I can try to do is provide a bit of help with the approach and the structure of the PI response document. What follows is my two-penn’orth, based on information and insights that I’ve gleaned from those who actually know what they’re talking about in this respect (including past and present panel members and the funders themselves).

Some points to keep in mind

Firstly, just to re-iterate, tone. I have seen panel feedback on unsuccessful proposals to the effect that “yep, we can see Reviewer Two hasn’t done a great job. But they’ve had a go and we appreciate that, so we think your stroppiness is unhelpful and uncalled for.” However good or bad their proposal was, this applicant’s PI response doesn’t seem to have endeared them to the panel. And that can’t have helped their cause. So don’t openly criticise the reviewers, or try to rubbish them. Trust the panel to spot the bad reviewers for themselves and to take their dodgy reviews with a small helping of salt. And remember – responsibility for good communication lies with the communicator (some more thoughts on this here). If someone has failed to grasp something it’s because you failed to communicate it clearly, not because they’re an idiot (you might think this privately, but don’t let it infect the tone of your response).

Politicians regularly infuriate interviewers and the public by refusing to answer the question, perhaps by blatantly answering a different question altogether. And it can be a tempting strategy to adopt when responding to reviews, particularly if some of the comments and questions are awkward to respond to or there are just so darn many of them. Perhaps if you just quietly ignore them, the panel won’t notice? The advice here though is always to try to be thorough and comprehensive in your response, addressing all the material points raised.

Also like politicians, reviewers aren’t always in unanimous agreement. While one reviewer might feel that your statistical power calculation is inadequate, for example, another might indicate that your methodological approach gives them no cause for concern. The response to the first reviewer though cannot simply be that the second reviewer thinks it’s all fine, so nah. Don’t waste the panel’s time by highlighting contrasting views between different reviewers. In this scenario, respond directly to the first reviewer, explaining clearly why you think your approach is appropriately powered – or perhaps even taking on board some of their suggestions. It’s important to be honest and receptive in this respect – if a reviewer has highlighted a limitation of your proposed methodology, or suggested an obvious improvement, then it’s probably counter-productive to dig your heels in and try to defend the indefensible.

When you do respond to a particular point, be specific in what you write and back up what you say with hard evidence, not just opinion and un-quantifiable assertions. This is particularly important if you’re rebutting a criticism, rather than accepting it and taking it on board. Point to peer-reviewed publications or whatever credible evidence you need to back up your statements.

Avoid just referring back to your proposal – if something wasn’t clear enough in the proposal then just repeating it or referring to a particular proposal section is unlikely to wow the panel. Take the opportunity to explain things in a different way, supplemented by a bit more detail if necessary. ‘Opportunity’ is the keyword here; remember how hard it was to fit everything you wanted to say into your Case for Support? Now’s your chance to use a few more pages to flesh out the bones of your proposal, demonstrate your specific knowledge and expertise, and introduce some new supporting data (you could include a link to it if it’s been published). There’s perhaps one exception to all this – if the reviewer has obviously missed something that you did in fact state clearly in the proposal, then tactfully draw the panel’s attention to the relevant material. Employ the same tact if you're correcting a clear factual error that the reviewer has made.

You’ll only be given a limited number of pages for your PI response, so use the space very wisely – be concise and make every word count. Assuming that you do have some important points of criticism to address, don’t go filling up the available space by reproducing all the positive comments. The panel members will have seen them in the reviews, so there’s not really much point in duplicating them if space is tight. While it’s nice to seem appreciative, it’s probably not worth filling up too much of the document with effusive words of thanks.

Similarly, there’s probably no need to reproduce the wording of each point of criticism before you address it. Instead, I’d suggest simply writing your responses under concise sub-headings. So for example, if one or more of the reviewers has suggested that the proposal seems a bit on the over-ambitious side, then you might address their concerns under a sub-heading like ‘Feasibility and scale of ambition’. It would probably be helpful to include the ‘reviewer reference’ number/s as part of each sub-heading, to indicate which reviewer/s have raised that particular point. A further benefit of using clear and descriptive sub-headings is that it will help to order your document and make it much easier to read.

Finally, if at all possible ask someone who’s not involved with the proposal to read through your response before you send it. Ask them specifically if the tone comes across as measured and professional, and whether they feel you have made any statements that don’t seem to be backed up by hard evidence.

It’s never felt more apposite to end a post with the words ‘good luck’.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. 

Adjectives in research proposals – methinks thou dost protest too much!

Our written world would be much less rich without adjectives. They put the paint on the walls of the picture in our mind’s eye, fill the imagined scene with a diversity of vivid sounds and scents, and give substance to the movie that plays out in our heads when we read or listen to words produced by others. In short, they describe the world, enabling us to sense it by proxy when we don’t sense it directly.

Consider the following sentence from P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Thank You, Jeeves, in which Sir Roderick Glossop describes an alarming encounter with what turns out to be a monkey on the stairs of the Dower House at the fictional Chuffnell Hall:

“I had scarcely reached the stairs when I observed a hideous form. A little, short, broad, bow-legged individual with long arms and a short, wizened face.”

This concise sentence paints for the reader a very clear and distinctive picture of whoever – or indeed whatever – it was that Sir Roderick came across on the stairs. Stripped of its adjectives though, all we’d learn from the sentence is that Sir Roderick encountered an individual that had arms and a face (as indeed the majority of individuals tend to have).

 

‘Good’ adjectives and ‘bad’ adjectives?

For the purposes of this short blog post, I’ll divide adjectives into two broad categories – ‘functional’ and ‘hyperbolic’ – and consider the respective effects of adjectives falling into each category when they’re used in the context of a research proposal.

Functional adjectives can be used to provide helpful or essential information to the reader. In describing this blog post as ‘short’, for example, I’m letting the reader know early on what they can expect – reassuring them that I’m not asking for too much of their time while managing any expectations that it might keep them occupied for the whole of their Penzance to Edinburgh train journey. Okay, ‘short’ is somewhat subjective – my short might be your lengthy when it comes to blog posts, for example – but if you’re one of my regular readers then at least we can establish that this post is a bit less lengthy than my usual monthly ramblings.

But what if I’d said ‘this amazing blog post’? Just by using a different type of adjective, I would have made a highly-subjective claim with which you might very well disagree. And whether you disagreed or not, you’d be well within your rights to want to decide for yourself whether it’s really an amazing post. By using hyperbole – hyping my blog in the hope that I’ll convince you to read it – I may well have annoyed you and put you off it altogether. You’d quite likely now be looking for grounds to refute my highly-questionable ‘amazing’ claim.

I’ve never actually seen anyone claim in writing that their proposed research project is amazing. But I do quite commonly encounter adjectives that may, to a greater or lesser extent, fall into my ‘hyperbolic’ category. Research methods are often described by those who have devised them as ‘novel’, for example, while areas of unmet clinical need are quite commonly held out to be ‘major’. These seemingly-innocuous descriptive words might however prompt the terse reviewer to remark that “I’ll be the judge of that!” Too much hype and not enough evidence to support it may start to raise suspicions that your claims are over-inflated. The title of this post misquotes Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude – Hamlet’s mother – who feels that a character in a play she’s watching is trying too hard to convince, and in doing so is undermining her own credibility. 

In their corporate guide to writing clearly, the National Centre for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has the following to say under the heading ‘Unnecessary adjectives’:

“Adjectives and adverbs (describing words) are subjective, can dilute your meaning and add to your word count.”

In a previous blog post, I made the case – with a little help from Nature journal’s writing-style guide for authors – that clear, plain-language writing such as is advocated by NICE will always improve a research proposal. So, are ‘novel’ and ‘major’ really examples of unnecessary adjectives?

What if I were to write about an illness that has no cure and is suffered by almost 5 million people in the UK and over 450 million people worldwide, causing over 500 premature deaths each week in the UK alone where a new diagnosis is made every two minutes on average? The condition causes complications that lead in the UK to 170 amputations, over 500 heart attacks and almost 700 strokes every week. In these two quite lengthy sentences I have used just two adjectives – both of them functional (‘premature’ and ‘new’). Do I really need to add in words like ‘major’, ‘significant’ and ‘considerable’ to underscore the severity of this public-health problem, or do the facts and figures render such adjectives redundant? If your research is addressing an important problem of some sort, have confidence in the facts as you present them and in your reader’s ability to interpret them. The condition, by the way, is diabetes.

The other example I gave, involving the use of ‘novel’, is perhaps a graver offence in a research proposal. Consider the following sentence: “This novel proposal will fill current gaps in understanding of the infection biology of Salmonella enterica.” The use of ‘novel’ here represents a completely unsubstantiated claim – how do we know the proposal is novel, and in what ways does it fit that description? Better to spell all of this out for the reader, and let them come to their own conclusion that your project includes some exciting new features and approaches. Describe those novel aspects, explaining what makes them different from what has gone before and perhaps pointing out how your own review of the published literature supports this contention. If your claims are accurate and backed up by the facts, then once again they should speak for themselves.

De-cluttering your text

Anyone who ever reads or listens to what I have to say on the subject of bid writing will know that I'm pretty evangelical about the use of plain language – keeping text clear and clean, uncluttered by anything that might detract from the meaning you wish to convey to the reader. Hyperbolic adjectives are a good example of the kind of unnecessary clutter that you should always look to cut out. In her book The Winning Bid: A practical guide to successful bid management, the author Emma Jaques echoes my enthusiasm for plain, uncluttered language:

“Use plain English when creating your text. In reality, this means using short sentences and writing in straightforward language that even the layperson can understand ... Try to avoid jargon, unnecessary adjectives (things like ‘really unique’), padding or fancy words...”

Going all-in on the adjective hate!

If I’ve prompted you look more closely at something you might be doing more or less unconsciously when you write, then you may be interested to take a look at this polemic article, which only half-jokingly makes the case against using adjectives in pretty much all forms of writing. In the article, the author – a professional writer and editor – quotes from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile and lists six key reasons why manuscripts are badly compromised by heavy reliance on adjectives and adverbs:

• less is more
• assuming that the reader can’t see what you want them to see is to underestimate them
• writers should always make the reader use their imagination
• the most overused adjectives and adverbs are common words that don’t add much
• adjectives and adverbs often don’t pack as much power as you might think
• excessive use makes for unnecessary slow reading

OK, so point four does look rather similar to point five from where I’m sitting. But with the exception of making readers use their imagination – fine for fiction and creative writing, maybe not so helpful in a research proposal, where we don’t want reviewers to do too much in the way of imagining or thinking for themselves – I reckon the above points apply as much to a research-funding bid as they might to a novel.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog.

Writing a decent Pathways to impact statement – your step-by-step guide

This month’s post – the first of the new decade – is aimed specifically at anyone preparing a research-funding proposal to one of the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) Research Councils – including Innovate UK and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and also the animals-in-science organisation NC3Rs. It's a rather long post, but my aim is to save you time and anguish in the long run.

With few exceptions, pretty much every research proposal submitted to UKRI will require a mandatory two-page (max) ‘Pathways to impact’ statement that must be uploaded with the rest of the proposal. It’s not uncommon for other funders to ask for something similar too, so the information below may have a degree of relevance beyond just UKRI (and NC3Rs) proposals.

Just what is a Pathways to impact statement anyway?

Let’s first clear something up, and consider what the Pathways to impact statement definitely is not. It is not a description of the impact that you intend for your proposed research. You have an opportunity to summarise this in the ‘Impact summary’ section, where you’ll set out some details of who you expect will benefit and how. And of course the Case for support will also provide an opportunity to discuss the impact potential of the research. Instead, the Pathways to impact statement is a description of what you and your project team can reasonably do to maximise the chances of the intended societal and economic impact actually happening. As such, it’s very much a companion document to the Impact summary.

A colleague of mine likes to use a ‘box of fireworks’ analogy when it comes to discussing research impact. A research project – the work packages and methods to be used – is the box full of fireworks. The beautiful multi-coloured display that those fireworks will produce is the impact. Extending the metaphor, the Pathways to impact statement is a description of how you plan to set the fireworks off in such a way as to ensure they give a spectacular show.

Is anyone really that interested?

Before we dive right in to the nuts and bolts of writing your Pathways document, let’s take a brief aside to consider the importance of this mandatory document. UKRI states that:

“A clearly thought through and acceptable Pathways to Impact is an essential component of a research proposal and a condition of funding. Grants will not be allowed to start until a clearly thought through and acceptable Pathways to Impact statement is received.”

The implication of the above is that it’s theoretically possible for a Research Council panel to award a grant, conditional on the applicant/s having another go at writing their Pathways to impact statement and making a better fist of it second time around. And while it’s not unheard of for this to happen, it would be a very risky strategy indeed to count on the brilliance of your proposed project dazzling the evaluators to such an extent that they turn a blind eye to your half-baked Pathways to impact. In reality, the Pathways document is part of the overall proposal, and reviewers will evaluate it along with the rest of the proposal’s content. They will look at it critically, and may take the view that a weak Pathways statement is indicative of a weak proposal. Sometimes it may effectively be the decider if your proposal is closely tied with a number of others around the ‘fund/don’t fund’ cut-off point. So don’t risk it!

An important section it may be, but many academics seem not to relish writing it. A few regard it with something akin to outright terror. I don’t think it should be so difficult to write though, and I hope that the step-by-step approach outlined below may help to demystify the process.

Step 0: Before you start

As we’ve seen, the Pathways document is not primarily a description of anticipated impact but rather a description of what you’ll do to make sure that impact actually happens and achieves maximum real-world benefit. So it makes absolute sense to write your Impact summary first, so that you completely understand your impact aims and you’re completely clear about what impact you’ll be facilitating. You might be interested in reading a previous blog post about writing the Impact summary section.

Step 0.5: A couple more things to help postpone the moment when you have to start writing

The Research Councils typically specify that the page margins for your Pathways document must be no less than 2cm all round, and that you must use no smaller than 11pt font – usually a sans-serif font like Arial. Line spacing must be no narrower than single. Double-check the funder’s particular requirements in this respect, and then set up your document accordingly. Of course, your margins can be wider if you want, and you can use a bigger font and more generous line spacing if you like. No one says that you can’t make your document look a little bit pretty either. And don’t feel the need to fill two pages just for the sake of it – UKRI says that “it is not expected that all applications will require [two whole pages].”

Step 1: Making an easy start

The blank sheet of paper can impose a curious form of tyranny on the writer, so it’s always nice to be able to pick off some low-hanging fruit in terms of stuff that needs to be written. Start then with the title – I suggest ‘Pathways to impact: [the title of your research proposal]’.  Although it’s part of a larger proposal, the Pathways to impact statement is a standalone document so a title is always helpful. Consider also including the name of the funding scheme and the applicant’s name beneath it. So, for example:

Pathways to impact: Using linked health records to evaluate chronic gum disease as a risk factor for later-life dementia

MRC Researcher-led Grant: PI Dr A. May Dupname

Step 2: A quick introductory recap

Again bearing in mind that this is a standalone document, it’s generally useful to include a short introductory paragraph briefly summarising the research, its importance, and its intended impact in terms of who it will benefit and how. You won’t be covering anything that you haven’t already covered elsewhere in the proposal, so keep it short – I’d suggest probably no more than 6-8 lines. Refer to the Impact summary if necessary rather than repeating too much if its contents.

Still nice and easy so far, hey?

I’ll note here that while UKRI doesn’t think everyone should need two whole pages for their Pathways document, you may find you’ve got so much to say that you’re struggling for space. If this is indeed the case, and you really don’t see any obvious way of shortening, then I guess the output of steps 1 and 2 is an obvious candidate for cutting. It’s all nice to have, but perhaps not absolutely essential.

Step 3: List the targets for your impact activities …

Now we’re getting right into the meat of the Pathways document. Thinking back to your Impact summary (you’ve written that already, right?), you probably worked under two main headings – ‘Who will benefit’ and ‘How will they benefit’. Each beneficiary, stakeholder and user group (and in some cases each individual beneficiary – for example a specific industry partner) that you’ve identified will be a target group for tailored impact activities. They will need to be dealt with in turn within your Pathways to impact statement. You might decide to use sub-headings to demarcate these sections clearly.

Step 4: … and describe your planned impact activities for each target group

Imagine for a moment that you had previously designed a project to benefit dementia patients and their families, plus people at risk of suffering from dementia in the future. There are also potential benefits for the healthcare system that diagnoses and treats dementia; the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to gain from information about new targets in dementia prevention and treatment; and the social-care system that’s responsible for providing ongoing care and support for those who are no longer able to look after themselves. You and your collaborators undertook the project successfully, and you now have a whole load of really-exciting new data about a significant modifiable risk factor for dementia. So what next? One thing’s for sure, if you just sit on your data and do nothing with it then it’s unlikely ever to lead to any meaningful impact for anyone.

It’s vital to make sure that the right information gets communicated in a timely manner, to the right people, and in the right ways, if you’re going to achieve your impact aims. You need some targeted and tailored impact activities.

If for example the key to making a positive difference among people who might one day suffer from dementia is behavioural change, then some clear and understandable messages about that change are needed. And you’ll need to get those messages out to as many people as possible, particularly those in high-risk groups, using whatever means are most effective. This could involve engaging with the mainstream media, and perhaps working with high-profile charitable organisations.

Perhaps there are implications for healthcare policymakers and maybe clinicians themselves – if so then how best to reach these audiences? Once again you’ll need to refine your key messages and the way in which you deliver them, and describe how you’ll reach the people and organisations who matter (often the decision-makers) within those audience groups. This might involve presenting at targeted healthcare-sector conferences, holding bespoke workshops, preparing articles for the specialist media, and maybe exploiting your existing network of influential contacts in these areas.

Maybe the pharmaceutical industry can benefit from your results by developing new treatments – so how best to engage with them? Perhaps you already have links with the industry, or maybe it’s once again a case of targeting appropriate industry publications, conferences and other events.

And so on, generally with at least one feasible and appropriately-designed impact activity planned for each main beneficiary group based clearly on their particular needs, priorities and interests. It’s good to be flexible in your approach to securing impact, and to show that you’re focused on impact outcomes rather than just activities and processes. I’m sure most reviewers will be pleased to know that, should an opportunity to maximise impact present itself, you’ll be sufficiently agile to grasp it.

    

Step 5: Take a quick sanity check

A handful of watch-points to consider at this juncture. First off, you’ll note that nowhere above have I mentioned academic impact and activities designed to achieve it. The Pathways document is just about societal and economic impact, and while it may be legitimate – particularly for a fundamental-science proposal – to acknowledge that achieving effective academic impact in the short term is the key to securing longer term real-world benefit, this is not the place to discuss academic impact and activities designed to achieve it in any sort of detail. Save all this for the ‘Academic beneficiaries’ section.

Secondly, note that Pathways to impact isn’t just about public engagement. It’s often worthwhile to communicate your research to the wider public, particularly if the subject area is likely to garner general interest, and raising public awareness and understanding of science (or other scholarly research) can to some extent be an impact in itself. But it’s not typically the primary impact aim of a research project, so public-engagement activities shouldn’t normally form the core of a Pathways to impact statement. Impact is about achieving real-word change, and not just raising awareness as an end in itself. If you are writing in some public-engagement activities, note that the best ones often adopt a two-way approach rather than being simple unidirectional outreach.

Finally, I cannot over-emphasise the importance of specificity. There’s a world of difference between saying “I will attend conferences and write articles for the specialist media”, and saying “I will submit an abstract to the Alzheimer’s Society Annual Conference (2022) and target specialist media including the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and the British Medical Journal – in all instances due to the extent of their reach among UK and international clinical audiences.” Being specific about the details of your proposed impact activities shows that you’ve thought about them properly and are taking this aspect of your project seriously – and that you haven’t just copied and pasted a line or two of generic text from a previous grant application.

Step 6: Ramp up that specificity!

An overview and description of your proposed impact activities lies at the heart of your Pathways document, and so the more specific detail you can provide about them the better. Where possible and appropriate, consider trying to add some of the following details for each activity to indicate how it will be planned and managed:

• Timetable – when will the activity take place, over what duration, and will it be repeated?
• People involved – which members of your team will be needed, and who else will you need to participate?
• Skills needed – for example if you propose to produce an information video or animation then will you need to outsource some of the specialist tasks?
• Deliverables – will there be tangible outputs from any of your impact activities – for example a suite of information leaflets, or a special report aimed at a particular audience group?
• An assessment of feasibility – it may be possible to give previous examples of similar activities that you have undertaken successfully

Step 7: Back up your claims

Every would-be critic likes to see a claim backed up by evidence and a solid track record, and your proposed impact activities are no exception. If you have some good examples of successful and effective impact activities from previous projects then refer to them, particularly if they’re similar in some way or otherwise of relevance to what you’re proposing to do here. Perhaps you have on-going engagement with relevant stakeholders – once again be sure to mention this, as it will add considerable credibility to your impact claims. Brevity is the key though; the Pathways document is primarily a forward-looking statement of intent rather than a résumé of your past activities.    

Step 8: Cost it all up

Many impact activities come with certain financial costs, and UKRI will expect you to include these in your project’s budget where applicable. There’s no harm in setting out briefly the resources needed for your impact activities and their associated costs in the Pathways document – once again, it demonstrates that you’re thinking through the details and taking the whole thing seriously.

  

Step 9: Explain how you’ll monitor and evaluate your activities

It’s important to keep tabs on whether project tasks are running to schedule and are meeting their objectives. Impact activities are no exception, so it’s good to explain briefly in your Pathways document what milestones and measures you’ll use to evaluate their progress and effectiveness. In the case of an information video, for example, a key milestone might be publication of the completed video on a public-facing website, while a measure of the effectiveness of this impact activity might be the number of downloads or views.

A non-step – don’t do this!

If you’re aiming for a successful outcome it’s often helpful to have an example of what success looks like to refer to. In the case of a Pathways to impact statement this might be one that you put together for a previously-funded project, the same thing from a colleague, or perhaps one of the examples published online by research-impact guru Mark Reed. I would though urge you to be very careful here, and avoid the very-real temptation to take the lazy-person’s approach. A good Pathways document will always be highly project specific, and so previously-successful examples are likely to have only very limited relevance for your own proposal beyond offering a general guide to the approach taken. Even here, beware – I’ve seen funded proposals that had, to my mind, a rather weak Pathways to impact statement that certainly didn’t tick off all of UKRI’s criteria. Okay, so they may have gotten away with it – perhaps the rest of their proposal was absolutely stellar. But I’d steer clear of the temptation to try to shoehorn your own list of stakeholder groups and impact aims into an approach developed specifically for a completely different project. And definitely don’t copy and paste!

But I’m a pure mathematician – there’s no real-world impact that I can reasonably predict!

The renowned mathematician and set theorist W. Hugh Woodin once made the following observation on the subject of impact:

“It’s a losing game to say that one area of mathematics will not have future application … Never make that prediction – you’ll lose!”

I agree, but it doesn’t provide much to work with when it comes to constructing a convincing Pathways to Impact statement. Fortunately, there’s a get-out for those who genuinely cannot link their research to any form of measureable impact outside of academia. While UKRI says that “being able to describe a pathways to impact [sic] will apply for the vast majority of proposals”, they do acknowledge that, exceptionally, this is not the case. They indicate that in this instance the Pathways to impact document should be used to explain why it just isn’t possible to complete this section in the normal manner. If you’re convinced this applies to you (and in my own area of focus, the life sciences, it never should!) then I’d recommend at least writing in some decently creative public-engagement activities to educate and inform the public about your research. And if at all possible, try to make some reasonable general predictions, perhaps based on historical precedent, as to the types of field in which your work might eventually have an impact – for example crypto security.

And that’s it – you’re about done. If you’ve followed each of the above steps reasonably faithfully then you should now have in front of you a passable Pathways to impact statement, ready for polishing and hopefully passing around to collaborators, institutional impact professionals and perhaps your non-academic project partners to critique.

Step 10 – because you just have to have 10 steps…   

Step 10 is optional, and it’s aimed at anyone who’s left still scratching their head. Mark Reed of specialist training company Fast Track Impact has produced a free online ‘Pathway to Impact Builder’ that will guide you through a series of questions and then spit out a draft Pathways statement. It’s not quite the no-effort magic solution that this short description might suggest (come back to me Mark when all I need to do is put in a project title and then press ‘Go’…), but it’s undeniably a neat idea. You can try it here.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and are in no way endorsed by my employer. Factual information and guidance are provided on a 'best-endeavour' basis and may become out of date over time. No responsibility can be taken for any action or inaction taken or not in respect of the content of this blog. The Fast Track Impact 'flower' logo above is the intellectual property of  the owner and is copyright protected. Edvard Munch's wonderful but very haunting painting The Scream is in the public domain, as by extension are photographs of it.