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How to write a research plan: Step-by-step guide

Last updated

30 January 2024

Reviewed by

Today’s businesses and institutions rely on data and analytics to inform their product and service decisions. These metrics influence how organizations stay competitive and inspire innovation. However, gathering data and insights requires carefully constructed research, and every research project needs a roadmap. This is where a research plan comes into play.

There’s general research planning; then there’s an official, well-executed research plan. Whatever data-driven research project you’re gearing up for, the research plan will be your framework for execution. The plan should also be detailed and thorough, with a diligent set of criteria to formulate your research efforts. Not including these key elements in your plan can be just as harmful as having no plan at all.

Read this step-by-step guide for writing a detailed research plan that can apply to any project, whether it’s scientific, educational, or business-related.

  • What is a research plan?

A research plan is a documented overview of a project in its entirety, from end to end. It details the research efforts, participants, and methods needed, along with any anticipated results. It also outlines the project’s goals and mission, creating layers of steps to achieve those goals within a specified timeline.

Without a research plan, you and your team are flying blind, potentially wasting time and resources to pursue research without structured guidance.

The principal investigator, or PI, is responsible for facilitating the research oversight. They will create the research plan and inform team members and stakeholders of every detail relating to the project. The PI will also use the research plan to inform decision-making throughout the project.

  • Why do you need a research plan?

Create a research plan before starting any official research to maximize every effort in pursuing and collecting the research data. Crucially, the plan will model the activities needed at each phase of the research project.

Like any roadmap, a research plan serves as a valuable tool providing direction for those involved in the project—both internally and externally. It will keep you and your immediate team organized and task-focused while also providing necessary definitions and timelines so you can execute your project initiatives with full understanding and transparency.

External stakeholders appreciate a working research plan because it’s a great communication tool, documenting progress and changing dynamics as they arise. Any participants of your planned research sessions will be informed about the purpose of your study, while the exercises will be based on the key messaging outlined in the official plan.

Here are some of the benefits of creating a research plan document for every project:

Project organization and structure

Well-informed participants

All stakeholders and teams align in support of the project

Clearly defined project definitions and purposes

Distractions are eliminated, prioritizing task focus

Timely management of individual task schedules and roles

Costly reworks are avoided

  • What should a research plan include?

The different aspects of your research plan will depend on the nature of the project. However, most official research plan documents will include the core elements below. Each aims to define the problem statement, devising an official plan for seeking a solution.

Specific project goals and individual objectives

Ideal strategies or methods for reaching those goals

Required resources

Descriptions of the target audience, sample sizes, demographics, and scopes

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Project background

Research and testing support

Preliminary studies and progress reporting mechanisms

Cost estimates and change order processes

Depending on the research project’s size and scope, your research plan could be brief—perhaps only a few pages of documented plans. Alternatively, it could be a fully comprehensive report. Either way, it’s an essential first step in dictating your project’s facilitation in the most efficient and effective way.

  • How to write a research plan for your project

When you start writing your research plan, aim to be detailed about each step, requirement, and idea. The more time you spend curating your research plan, the more precise your research execution efforts will be.

Account for every potential scenario, and be sure to address each and every aspect of the research.

Consider following this flow to develop a great research plan for your project:

Define your project’s purpose

Start by defining your project’s purpose. Identify what your project aims to accomplish and what you are researching. Remember to use clear language.

Thinking about the project’s purpose will help you set realistic goals and inform how you divide tasks and assign responsibilities. These individual tasks will be your stepping stones to reach your overarching goal.

Additionally, you’ll want to identify the specific problem, the usability metrics needed, and the intended solutions.

Know the following three things about your project’s purpose before you outline anything else:

What you’re doing

Why you’re doing it

What you expect from it

Identify individual objectives

With your overarching project objectives in place, you can identify any individual goals or steps needed to reach those objectives. Break them down into phases or steps. You can work backward from the project goal and identify every process required to facilitate it.

Be mindful to identify each unique task so that you can assign responsibilities to various team members. At this point in your research plan development, you’ll also want to assign priority to those smaller, more manageable steps and phases that require more immediate or dedicated attention.

Select research methods

Research methods might include any of the following:

User interviews: this is a qualitative research method where researchers engage with participants in one-on-one or group conversations. The aim is to gather insights into their experiences, preferences, and opinions to uncover patterns, trends, and data.

Field studies: this approach allows for a contextual understanding of behaviors, interactions, and processes in real-world settings. It involves the researcher immersing themselves in the field, conducting observations, interviews, or experiments to gather in-depth insights.

Card sorting: participants categorize information by sorting content cards into groups based on their perceived similarities. You might use this process to gain insights into participants’ mental models and preferences when navigating or organizing information on websites, apps, or other systems.

Focus groups: use organized discussions among select groups of participants to provide relevant views and experiences about a particular topic.

Diary studies: ask participants to record their experiences, thoughts, and activities in a diary over a specified period. This method provides a deeper understanding of user experiences, uncovers patterns, and identifies areas for improvement.

Five-second testing: participants are shown a design, such as a web page or interface, for just five seconds. They then answer questions about their initial impressions and recall, allowing you to evaluate the design’s effectiveness.

Surveys: get feedback from participant groups with structured surveys. You can use online forms, telephone interviews, or paper questionnaires to reveal trends, patterns, and correlations.

Tree testing: tree testing involves researching web assets through the lens of findability and navigability. Participants are given a textual representation of the site’s hierarchy (the “tree”) and asked to locate specific information or complete tasks by selecting paths.

Usability testing: ask participants to interact with a product, website, or application to evaluate its ease of use. This method enables you to uncover areas for improvement in digital key feature functionality by observing participants using the product.

Live website testing: research and collect analytics that outlines the design, usability, and performance efficiencies of a website in real time.

There are no limits to the number of research methods you could use within your project. Just make sure your research methods help you determine the following:

What do you plan to do with the research findings?

What decisions will this research inform? How can your stakeholders leverage the research data and results?

Recruit participants and allocate tasks

Next, identify the participants needed to complete the research and the resources required to complete the tasks. Different people will be proficient at different tasks, and having a task allocation plan will allow everything to run smoothly.

Prepare a thorough project summary

Every well-designed research plan will feature a project summary. This official summary will guide your research alongside its communications or messaging. You’ll use the summary while recruiting participants and during stakeholder meetings. It can also be useful when conducting field studies.

Ensure this summary includes all the elements of your research project. Separate the steps into an easily explainable piece of text that includes the following:

An introduction: the message you’ll deliver to participants about the interview, pre-planned questioning, and testing tasks.

Interview questions: prepare questions you intend to ask participants as part of your research study, guiding the sessions from start to finish.

An exit message: draft messaging your teams will use to conclude testing or survey sessions. These should include the next steps and express gratitude for the participant’s time.

Create a realistic timeline

While your project might already have a deadline or a results timeline in place, you’ll need to consider the time needed to execute it effectively.

Realistically outline the time needed to properly execute each supporting phase of research and implementation. And, as you evaluate the necessary schedules, be sure to include additional time for achieving each milestone in case any changes or unexpected delays arise.

For this part of your research plan, you might find it helpful to create visuals to ensure your research team and stakeholders fully understand the information.

Determine how to present your results

A research plan must also describe how you intend to present your results. Depending on the nature of your project and its goals, you might dedicate one team member (the PI) or assume responsibility for communicating the findings yourself.

In this part of the research plan, you’ll articulate how you’ll share the results. Detail any materials you’ll use, such as:

Presentations and slides

A project report booklet

A project findings pamphlet

Documents with key takeaways and statistics

Graphic visuals to support your findings

  • Format your research plan

As you create your research plan, you can enjoy a little creative freedom. A plan can assume many forms, so format it how you see fit. Determine the best layout based on your specific project, intended communications, and the preferences of your teams and stakeholders.

Find format inspiration among the following layouts:

Written outlines

Narrative storytelling

Visual mapping

Graphic timelines

Remember, the research plan format you choose will be subject to change and adaptation as your research and findings unfold. However, your final format should ideally outline questions, problems, opportunities, and expectations.

  • Research plan example

Imagine you’ve been tasked with finding out how to get more customers to order takeout from an online food delivery platform. The goal is to improve satisfaction and retain existing customers. You set out to discover why more people aren’t ordering and what it is they do want to order or experience. 

You identify the need for a research project that helps you understand what drives customer loyalty. But before you jump in and start calling past customers, you need to develop a research plan—the roadmap that provides focus, clarity, and realistic details to the project.

Here’s an example outline of a research plan you might put together:

Project title

Project members involved in the research plan

Purpose of the project (provide a summary of the research plan’s intent)

Objective 1 (provide a short description for each objective)

Objective 2

Objective 3

Proposed timeline

Audience (detail the group you want to research, such as customers or non-customers)

Budget (how much you think it might cost to do the research)

Risk factors/contingencies (any potential risk factors that may impact the project’s success)

Remember, your research plan doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel—it just needs to fit your project’s unique needs and aims.

Customizing a research plan template

Some companies offer research plan templates to help get you started. However, it may make more sense to develop your own customized plan template. Be sure to include the core elements of a great research plan with your template layout, including the following:

Introductions to participants and stakeholders

Background problems and needs statement

Significance, ethics, and purpose

Research methods, questions, and designs

Preliminary beliefs and expectations

Implications and intended outcomes

Realistic timelines for each phase

Conclusion and presentations

How many pages should a research plan be?

Generally, a research plan can vary in length between 500 to 1,500 words. This is roughly three pages of content. More substantial projects will be 2,000 to 3,500 words, taking up four to seven pages of planning documents.

What is the difference between a research plan and a research proposal?

A research plan is a roadmap to success for research teams. A research proposal, on the other hand, is a dissertation aimed at convincing or earning the support of others. Both are relevant in creating a guide to follow to complete a project goal.

What are the seven steps to developing a research plan?

While each research project is different, it’s best to follow these seven general steps to create your research plan:

Defining the problem

Identifying goals

Choosing research methods

Recruiting participants

Preparing the brief or summary

Establishing task timelines

Defining how you will present the findings

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Implementation research: what it is and how to do it

  • Related content
  • Peer review
  • David H Peters , professor 1 ,
  • Taghreed Adam , scientist 2 ,
  • Olakunle Alonge , assistant scientist 1 ,
  • Irene Akua Agyepong , specialist public health 3 ,
  • Nhan Tran , manager 4
  • 1 Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of International Health, 615 N Wolfe St, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
  • 2 Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, World Health Organization, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland
  • 3 University of Ghana School of Public Health/Ghana Health Service, Accra, Ghana
  • 4 Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, Implementation Research Platform, World Health Organization, CH-1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland
  • Correspondence to: D H Peters  dpeters{at}jhsph.edu
  • Accepted 8 October 2013

Implementation research is a growing but not well understood field of health research that can contribute to more effective public health and clinical policies and programmes. This article provides a broad definition of implementation research and outlines key principles for how to do it

The field of implementation research is growing, but it is not well understood despite the need for better research to inform decisions about health policies, programmes, and practices. This article focuses on the context and factors affecting implementation, the key audiences for the research, implementation outcome variables that describe various aspects of how implementation occurs, and the study of implementation strategies that support the delivery of health services, programmes, and policies. We provide a framework for using the research question as the basis for selecting among the wide range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods that can be applied in implementation research, along with brief descriptions of methods specifically suitable for implementation research. Expanding the use of well designed implementation research should contribute to more effective public health and clinical policies and programmes.

Defining implementation research

Implementation research attempts to solve a wide range of implementation problems; it has its origins in several disciplines and research traditions (supplementary table A). Although progress has been made in conceptualising implementation research over the past decade, 1 considerable confusion persists about its terminology and scope. 2 3 4 The word “implement” comes from the Latin “implere,” meaning to fulfil or to carry into effect. 5 This provides a basis for a broad definition of implementation research that can be used across research traditions and has meaning for practitioners, policy makers, and the interested public: “Implementation research is the scientific inquiry into questions concerning implementation—the act of carrying an intention into effect, which in health research can be policies, programmes, or individual practices (collectively called interventions).”

Implementation research can consider any aspect of implementation, including the factors affecting implementation, the processes of implementation, and the results of implementation, including how to introduce potential solutions into a health system or how to promote their large scale use and sustainability. The intent is to understand what, why, and how interventions work in “real world” settings and to test approaches to improve them.

Principles of implementation research

Implementation research seeks to understand and work within real world conditions, rather than trying to control for these conditions or to remove their influence as causal effects. This implies working with populations that will be affected by an intervention, rather than selecting beneficiaries who may not represent the target population of an intervention (such as studying healthy volunteers or excluding patients who have comorbidities).

Context plays a central role in implementation research. Context can include the social, cultural, economic, political, legal, and physical environment, as well as the institutional setting, comprising various stakeholders and their interactions, and the demographic and epidemiological conditions. The structure of the health systems (for example, the roles played by governments, non-governmental organisations, other private providers, and citizens) is particularly important for implementation research on health.

Implementation research is especially concerned with the users of the research and not purely the production of knowledge. These users may include managers and teams using quality improvement strategies, executive decision makers seeking advice for specific decisions, policy makers who need to be informed about particular programmes, practitioners who need to be convinced to use interventions that are based on evidence, people who are influenced to change their behaviour to have a healthier life, or communities who are conducting the research and taking action through the research to improve their conditions (supplementary table A). One important implication is that often these actors should be intimately involved in the identification, design, and conduct phases of research and not just be targets for dissemination of study results.

Implementation outcome variables

Implementation outcome variables describe the intentional actions to deliver services. 6 These implementation outcome variables—acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, implementation cost, coverage, and sustainability—can all serve as indicators of the success of implementation (table 1 ⇓ ). Implementation research uses these variables to assess how well implementation has occurred or to provide insights about how this contributes to one’s health status or other important health outcomes.

 Implementation outcome variables

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Implementation strategies

Curran and colleagues defined an “implementation intervention” as a method to “enhance the adoption of a ‘clinical’ intervention,” such as the use of job aids, provider education, or audit procedures. 7 The concept can be broadened to any type of strategy that is designed to support a clinical or population and public health intervention (for example, outreach clinics and supervision checklists are implementation strategies used to improve the coverage and quality of immunisation).

A review of ways to improve health service delivery in low and middle income countries identified a wide range of successful implementation strategies (supplementary table B). 8 Even in the most resource constrained environments, measuring change, informing stakeholders, and using information to guide decision making were found to be critical to successful implementation.

Implementation influencing variables

Other factors that influence implementation may need to be considered in implementation research. Sabatier summarised a set of such factors that influence policy implementation (clarity of objectives, causal theory, implementing personnel, support of interest groups, and managerial authority and resources). 9

The large array of contextual factors that influence implementation, interact with each other, and change over time highlights the fact that implementation often occurs as part of complex adaptive systems. 10 Some implementation strategies are particularly suitable for working in complex systems. These include strategies to provide feedback to key stakeholders and to encourage learning and adaptation by implementing agencies and beneficiary groups. Such strategies have implications for research, as the study methods need to be sufficiently flexible to account for changes or adaptations in what is actually being implemented. 8 11 Research designs that depend on having a single and fixed intervention, such as a typical randomised controlled trial, would not be an appropriate design to study phenomena that change, especially when they change in unpredictable and variable ways.

Another implication of studying complex systems is that the research may need to use multiple methods and different sources of information to understand an implementation problem. Because implementation activities and effects are not usually static or linear processes, research designs often need to be able to observe and analyse these sometimes iterative and changing elements at several points in time and to consider unintended consequences.

Implementation research questions

As in other types of health systems research, the research question is the king in implementation research. Implementation research takes a pragmatic approach, placing the research question (or implementation problem) as the starting point to inquiry; this then dictates the research methods and assumptions to be used. Implementation research questions can cover a wide variety of topics and are frequently organised around theories of change or the type of research objective (examples are in supplementary table C). 12 13

Implementation research can overlap with other types of research used in medicine and public health, and the distinctions are not always clear cut. A range of implementation research exists, based on the centrality of implementation in the research question, the degree to which the research takes place in a real world setting with routine populations, and the role of implementation strategies and implementation variables in the research (figure ⇓ ).

Spectrum of implementation research 33

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A more detailed description of the research question can help researchers and practitioners to determine the type of research methods that should be used. In table 2 ⇓ , we break down the research question first by its objective: to explore, describe, influence, explain, or predict. This is followed by a typical implementation research question based on each objective. Finally, we describe a set of research methods for each type of research question.

 Type of implementation research objective, implementation question, and research methods

Much of evidence based medicine is concerned with the objective of influence, or whether an intervention produces an expected outcome, which can be broken down further by the level of certainty in the conclusions drawn from the study. The nature of the inquiry (for example, the amount of risk and considerations of ethics, costs, and timeliness), and the interests of different audiences, should determine the level of uncertainty. 8 14 Research questions concerning programmatic decisions about the process of an implementation strategy may justify a lower level of certainty for the manager and policy maker, using research methods that would support an adequacy or plausibility inference. 14 Where a high risk of harm exists and sufficient time and resources are available, a probability study design might be more appropriate, in which the result in an area where the intervention is implemented is compared with areas without implementation with a low probability of error (for example, P< 0.05). These differences in the level of confidence affect the study design in terms of sample size and the need for concurrent or randomised comparison groups. 8 14

Implementation specific research methods

A wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods can be used in implementation research (table 2 ⇑ ). The box gives a set of basic questions to guide the design or reporting of implementation research that can be used across methods. More in-depth criteria have also been proposed to assess the external validity or generalisability of findings. 15 Some research methods have been developed specifically to deal with implementation research questions or are particularly suitable to implementation research, as identified below.

Key questions to assess research designs or reports on implementation research 33

Does the research clearly aim to answer a question concerning implementation?

Does the research clearly identify the primary audiences for the research and how they would use the research?

Is there a clear description of what is being implemented (for example, details of the practice, programme, or policy)?

Does the research involve an implementation strategy? If so, is it described and examined in its fullness?

Is the research conducted in a “real world” setting? If so, is the context and sample population described in sufficient detail?

Does the research appropriately consider implementation outcome variables?

Does the research appropriately consider context and other factors that influence implementation?

Does the research appropriately consider changes over time and the level of complexity of the system, including unintended consequences?

Pragmatic trials

Pragmatic trials, or practical trials, are randomised controlled trials in which the main research question focuses on effectiveness of an intervention in a normal practice setting with the full range of study participants. 16 This may include pragmatic trials on new healthcare delivery strategies, such as integrated chronic care clinics or nurse run community clinics. This contrasts with typical randomised controlled trials that look at the efficacy of an intervention in an “ideal” or controlled setting and with highly selected patients and standardised clinical outcomes, usually of a short term nature.

Effectiveness-implementation hybrid trials

Effectiveness-implementation hybrid designs are intended to assess the effectiveness of both an intervention and an implementation strategy. 7 These studies include components of an effectiveness design (for example, randomised allocation to intervention and comparison arms) but add the testing of an implementation strategy, which may also be randomised. This might include testing the effectiveness of a package of delivery and postnatal care in under-served areas, as well testing several strategies for providing the care. Whereas pragmatic trials try to fix the intervention under study, effectiveness-implementation hybrids also intervene and/or observe the implementation process as it actually occurs. This can be done by assessing implementation outcome variables.

Quality improvement studies

Quality improvement studies typically involve a set of structured and cyclical processes, often called the plan-do-study-act cycle, and apply scientific methods on a continuous basis to formulate a plan, implement the plan, and analyse and interpret the results, followed by an iteration of what to do next. 17 18 The focus might be on a clinical process, such as how to reduce hospital acquired infections in the intensive care unit, or management processes such as how to reduce waiting times in the emergency room. Guidelines exist on how to design and report such research—the Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE). 17

Speroff and O’Connor describe a range of plan-do-study-act research designs, noting that they have in common the assessment of responses measured repeatedly and regularly over time, either in a single case or with comparison groups. 18 Balanced scorecards integrate performance measures across a range of domains and feed into regular decision making. 19 20 Standardised guidance for using good quality health information systems and health facility surveys has been developed and often provides the sources of information for these quasi-experimental designs. 21 22 23

Participatory action research

Participatory action research refers to a range of research methods that emphasise participation and action (that is, implementation), using methods that involve iterative processes of reflection and action, “carried out with and by local people rather than on them.” 24 In participatory action research, a distinguishing feature is that the power and control over the process rests with the participants themselves. Although most participatory action methods involve qualitative methods, quantitative and mixed methods techniques are increasingly being used, such as for participatory rural appraisal or participatory statistics. 25 26

Mixed methods

Mixed methods research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis in the same study. Although not designed specifically for implementation research, mixed methods are particularly suitable because they provide a practical way to understand multiple perspectives, different types of causal pathways, and multiple types of outcomes—all common features of implementation research problems.

Many different schemes exist for describing different types of mixed methods research, on the basis of the emphasis of the study, the sampling schemes for the different components, the timing and sequencing of the qualitative and quantitative methods, and the level of mixing between the qualitative and quantitative methods. 27 28 Broad guidance on the design and conduct of mixed methods designs is available. 29 30 31 A scheme for good reporting of mixed methods studies involves describing the justification for using a mixed methods approach to the research question; describing the design in terms of the purpose, priority, and sequence of methods; describing each method in terms of sampling, data collection, and analysis; describing where the integration has occurred, how it has occurred, and who has participated in it; describing any limitation of one method associated with the presence of the other method; and describing any insights gained from mixing or integrating methods. 32

Implementation research aims to cover a wide set of research questions, implementation outcome variables, factors affecting implementation, and implementation strategies. This paper has identified a range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods that can be used according to the specific research question, as well as several research designs that are particularly suited to implementation research. Further details of these concepts can be found in a new guide developed by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research. 33

Summary points

Implementation research has its origins in many disciplines and is usefully defined as scientific inquiry into questions concerning implementation—the act of fulfilling or carrying out an intention

In health research, these intentions can be policies, programmes, or individual practices (collectively called interventions)

Implementation research seeks to understand and work in “real world” or usual practice settings, paying particular attention to the audience that will use the research, the context in which implementation occurs, and the factors that influence implementation

A wide variety of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods techniques can be used in implementation research, which are best selected on the basis of the research objective and specific questions related to what, why, and how interventions work

Implementation research may examine strategies that are specifically designed to improve the carrying out of health interventions or assess variables that are defined as implementation outcomes

Implementation outcomes include acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, implementation cost, coverage, and sustainability

Cite this as: BMJ 2013;347:f6753

Contributors: All authors contributed to the conception and design, analysis and interpretation, drafting the article, or revising it critically for important intellectual content, and all gave final approval of the version to be published. NT had the original idea for the article, which was discussed by the authors (except OA) as well as George Pariyo, Jim Sherry, and Dena Javadi at a meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO). DHP and OA did the literature reviews, and DHP wrote the original outline and the draft manuscript, tables, and boxes. OA prepared the original figure. All authors reviewed the draft article and made substantial revisions to the manuscript. DHP is the guarantor.

Funding: Funding was provided by the governments of Norway and Sweden and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in support of the WHO Implementation Research Platform, which financed a meeting of authors and salary support for NT. DHP is supported by the Future Health Systems research programme consortium, funded by DFID for the benefit of developing countries (grant number H050474). The funders played no role in the design, conduct, or reporting of the research.

Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare: support for the submitted work as described above; NT and TA are employees of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research at WHO, which is supporting their salaries to work on implementation research; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

Provenance and peer review: Invited by journal; commissioned by WHO; externally peer reviewed.

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  • ↵ Edward A, Kumar B, Kakar F, Salehi AS, Burnham G. Peters DH. Configuring balanced scorecards for measuring health systems performance: evidence from five years’ evaluation in Afghanistan. PLOS Med 2011 ; 7 : e1001066 . OpenUrl
  • ↵ Health Facility Assessment Technical Working Group. Profiles of health facility assessment method, MEASURE Evaluation, USAID, 2008.
  • ↵ Hotchkiss D, Diana M, Foreit K. How can routine health information systems improve health systems functioning in low-resource settings? Assessing the evidence base. MEASURE Evaluation, USAID, 2012.
  • ↵ Lindelow M, Wagstaff A. Assessment of health facility performance: an introduction to data and measurement issues. In: Amin S, Das J, Goldstein M, eds. Are you being served? New tools for measuring service delivery. World Bank, 2008:19-66.
  • ↵ Cornwall A, Jewkes R. “What is participatory research?” Soc Sci Med 1995 ; 41 : 1667 -76. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
  • ↵ Mergler D. Worker participation in occupational health research: theory and practice. Int J Health Serv 1987 ; 17 : 151 . OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
  • ↵ Chambers R. Revolutions in development inquiry. Earthscan, 2008.
  • ↵ Creswell JW, Plano Clark VL. Designing and conducting mixed methods research. Sage Publications, 2011.
  • ↵ Tashakkori A, Teddlie C. Mixed methodology: combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Sage Publications, 2003.
  • ↵ Leech NL, Onwuegbuzie AJ. Guidelines for conducting and reporting mixed research in the field of counseling and beyond. Journal of Counseling and Development 2010 ; 88 : 61 -9. OpenUrl CrossRef Web of Science
  • ↵ Creswell JW. Mixed methods procedures. In: Research design: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. 3rd ed. Sage Publications, 2009.
  • ↵ Creswell JW, Klassen AC, Plano Clark VL, Clegg Smith K. Best practices for mixed methods research in the health sciences. National Institutes of Health, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, 2011.
  • ↵ O’Cathain A, Murphy E, Nicholl J. The quality of mixed methods studies in health services research. J Health Serv Res Policy 2008 ; 13 : 92 -8. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
  • ↵ Peters DH, Tran N, Adam T, Ghaffar A. Implementation research in health: a practical guide. Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, World Health Organization, 2013.
  • Rogers EM. Diffusion of innovations. 5th ed. Free Press, 2003.
  • Carroll C, Patterson M, Wood S, Booth A, Rick J, Balain S. A conceptual framework for implementation fidelity. Implement Sci 2007 ; 2 : 40 . OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed
  • Victora CG, Schellenberg JA, Huicho L, Amaral J, El Arifeen S, Pariyo G, et al. Context matters: interpreting impact findings in child survival evaluations. Health Policy Plan 2005 ; 20 (suppl 1): i18 -31. OpenUrl Abstract

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Project management

Implementation plan: What to include and 5 essential steps

Ben Brigden - Senior Content Marketing Specialist - Author

A project plan or project implementation plan is a key strategic document that keeps teams on track throughout a project, indicating how a project is expected to run along with who’s responsible for what. It’s an extremely valuable planning tool — one that can be the difference between project success and project failure.

It’s also a fairly comprehensive document, and if you’ve never built one before, the concept can feel a bit overwhelming.

In this post, we’ll give you a five-step plan for building and implementing a project plan. First, we’ll walk you through what a project implementation plan looks like, why you should create one for every project, and what each plan should include.

  • What is a project implementation plan?

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A project implementation plan is a document that defines how a project will be executed. Implementation plans outline the project's goals, scope, and purpose, as well as listing the resources (including team members) necessary for a successful project.

Project implementation plans are sometimes called “strategic plans” because they lay out the strategy proposed for a project. But we like the longer name because it conveys more than just strategy: It suggests a process going into action, and it answers the question of how a team will arrive at a goal.

A project implementation plan serves as a critical reference point throughout the project's lifecycle, ensuring everyone is on the same page and everything is on the right track. It's a vital document for guiding decision-making, mitigating risks, and ultimately ensuring the successful completion of the project from start to finish.

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  • Why every project should start with an implementation plan

Why start each project with an implementation plan? Simple: because you want the project to succeed, and you want an objective way to know if it succeeded.

Starting each project with an implementation plan accomplishes quite a bit for most teams and businesses, primarily because it creates a shared sense of vision and understanding and points toward a clearly defined goal.

Most teams realize these four benefits (and plenty more) when they create a thorough and functional project implementation plan:

It creates an actionable roadmap of the scope of work

Projects run the gamut from extremely simple to lengthy and complex. The more complicated and interconnected the project, the greater the chance for confusion.

Whatever the level of complexity, chaos ensues when team members aren’t clear on what to do, when to do it, or why they’re doing it.

A project implementation plan is the antidote to this kind of chaos because it shows all parties what the path forward looks like (the roadmap ) — as well as what is and isn’t on that path (the scope of work).

It makes goals and communication transparent to all stakeholders

When all parties understand the goals of a project, you lessen confusion around those goals. There may still be disagreement on how to best achieve a goal, but there’s no confusion about what the team is aiming to accomplish.

Also, a central, accessible document containing all relevant aspects of a project creates a single source of truth for teams, managers, executives, vendors, customers, and more. When anyone and everyone associated with a project is working from the same playbook, teams and businesses enjoy clearer, more focused, and more transparent communication .

It holds your team members accountable

Around 70% of businesses report having at least one failed project in the last year. We’ve all been part of a project where no one seemed accountable for problems or even total project failure. Of course, no one likes taking the blame and finding a scapegoat isn’t always terribly productive. Still, if you have a team member or business unit that’s consistently failing to deliver, you want to know.

A strong project implementation plan makes clear who’s responsible for what within a project. It gives project managers and team leads a stronger understanding of task accountability, helping to hold team members accountable for their work.

And most of the time, better accountability comes with better results!

It helps your entire team stay on the same page

You’ll never completely eliminate scope creep (something that occurred within more than a third of projects in 2021), nor should you. Parameters for various deliverables or even the entire project can and do change over the course of a project, and sometimes a change in scope is clearly the right decision.

But not all scope creep is good. Especially with longer or more complex projects, it’s common for team members to lose focus on the top-level goals — not to mention the specific steps needed to reach those goals.

This loss of focus is preventable, though, as is the scope creep that grows from it. A project implementation plan keeps the big-picture goals and the steps required to meet them in focus. When a change in scope is warranted, it should be documented within or alongside the implementation plan.

  • Essential components of a great implementation plan

Most well-designed implementation plans contain these essential items, though it’s important to note that implementation plans vary widely, just like the projects they’re attached to.

These elements comprise a solid foundation for your next implementation plan. Start with these, but feel free to add additional elements that make sense for your industry or project type.

1) Scope statement

The scope statement outlines the scope of the project — essentially, what work will be performed in the project (and what work would be considered out of scope).

2) Project milestones, goals, and key objectives

Project goals are the high-level outcomes the project aims to achieve. Key objectives are the steps or intermediate outcomes that will occur throughout the project in support of the project goals. Project milestones are the points of measurement along the way, usually significant or tangible in some way.

Examples of milestones across a few industry contexts include wireframe completed, beta launch, copy drafted, or the completion of a phase, segment, or function that’s part of the whole.

3) Detailed resource plan

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A project’s resource plan indicates which human resources are involved along with their time or workload commitment. You should also include materials and equipment (typically, only what’s beyond the standard stuff every employee already has) needed for successful project completion.

4) Estimated implementation timeline

A key element of any implementation plan is a concrete timeframe for the project (and its implementation). These dates are rarely perfect at the outset of a project, but they provide a goal to work toward and give stakeholders some context for what they’re signing off on.

Most project teams use project management software for creating project timelines , often in the form of a Gantt chart.

5) Implementation plan milestones

Your implementation plan may benefit from its own set of internal milestones, separate from the broader project milestones. These internal milestones are more useful on highly complex projects with multiple levels of approval and numerous departments supplying information.

Implementation plan milestones could look like these: initial stakeholder information gathered, plan drafted, plan discussed and feedback incorporated, final sign-off by all stakeholders.

6) Implementation plan KPIs & metrics

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Your key performance indicators (KPIs) or other metrics reveal how well the team is accomplishing the implementation plan. Establish measurable indicators, state what they are within the plan itself, and then track them over the course of the project.

Here, a quality project management tool is essential if you want to succeed with measurements that span the length of a project.

  • 5 easy steps to create your project implementation plan

Now you know what needs to go into your project implementation plan — but how do you actually create one and get the implementation process started?

We know this process can seem daunting at first, and it does take some upfront work. But the process doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. Follow these five easy steps to create an implementation plan that helps keep your project and your team on track. Then, as future projects arise, use these questions as a template of sorts to create a quality implementation and management plan for each one.

Teamwork.com’s project management template is an easy way to start building your plan today.

  • 1) Define your goals and milestones

Before you can create a plan for how to get where you want to go, you need to spend some time deciding where you want to go .

So, before you start building out any other part of a project implementation or action plan, start by devoting time to the what and the where:

What are you trying to accomplish? (Project-level goals)

What needs to happen to reach those goals? (Project objectives)

What are the intermediate steps or milestones that demonstrate progress along the path toward the project’s goals? (Project milestones)

Once you establish goals, objectives, and milestones — and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders and project team members on those goals and milestones — you’re ready to proceed to step two.

  • 2) Conduct research by interviewing, surveying, or observing

Research is one key element of a successful implementation plan. In many project contexts, this research looks like interviewing or surveying various stakeholders, subject matter experts, department leaders, and so on — gathering the information necessary to build your implementation strategy.

Sometimes observation is a key strategy as well: Watching what another team (or vendor or external organization) does or has done on a similar project can provide valuable insights.

  • 3) Brainstorm and map out potential risks

Every project has inherent potential risks. Some of these can be foreseen, while others seem to come out of nowhere. Take the pandemic as one example of the latter category. Yes, businesses should have business continuity and disaster management policies in place, but few — if any — businesses had a concrete plan of action lined up for a global pandemic.

So, there are risks you can’t plan for and could never predict. But there are plenty of risks that, with a little bit of brainstorming and planning, should be easy to discover. These are the ones you need to target as you perform a risk assessment.

Map out the known risks, along with potential impacts and mitigation strategies for each one. Some risks are entirely avoidable so long as you take appropriate risk management actions. Others may not be completely preventable, but having a plan in place will greatly reduce their impact.

  • 4) Assign and delegate essential tasks

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Every good implementation plan will include a work plan or action plan that lists out the tasks within the project to a certain level of granularity. These tasks eventually get plugged into a calendar or schedule of some sort, often within project planning software suites like Teamwork.com .

No matter what method or platform you’re using, at this stage, you need to map out or schedule these tasks. As a part of this step, make sure you assign and delegate tasks to specific resources (or, at minimum, specific departments or work groups).

This step is key to successful project execution, as it assigns responsibility and accountability for every task included in the plan, bringing clarity to who’s doing what and when.

  • 5) Finalize your plan and allocate resources

Next up is allocating resources. You already assigned tasks to people (or departments) in the previous step, so what do we mean here that’s any different?

Put simply, there’s a difference between putting on paper that “Sam will handle task 35” (assigning tasks) and actually making sure that Sam has the capacity to handle task 35 (allocating resources).

In step 4, all you really did was determine who’s doing what. Now, during resource allocation, you make sure that your assignment plan is achievable. Resource allocation means assigning tasks to resources that are actually available. In other words, you need to make sure task 35 doesn’t land on Sam’s desk the same day as 10 other tasks.

Last, once everything else about your plan has been crafted, vetted, and approved, it’s time to finalize the plan. Usually, this involves sending out the completed plan for a final round of approvals.

Once approved, the project implementation plan becomes a single source of truth for the team and other stakeholders. So make sure to store the plan in a central, accessible location. ( Teamwork.com is a great place for this , if you ask us!)

  • Create an effective project plan with Teamwork.com

Creating a project implementation plan requires careful planning and attention to innumerable details, but the results are worth the investment. Increase your project success rate, productivity, morale, and more by keeping teams focused on the right shared outcomes.

We’ve hinted at this a few times already, but project implementation planning (along with all the other documents and documentation you need to prepare to get a project off the ground) is infinitely easier when you use the right tools.

Teamwork.com is a powerful all-in-one platform for client work — including complete operations control and project management — that gives you a central location to store project data, robust yet flexible templates, and visibility into current and past project data. Teamwork.com can cut down on the detail work and keep your information organized in a digestible, more user-friendly way, ultimately empowering you and your teams to achieve better work for your clients, be more profitable, and stay on track.

See more of what Teamwork.com can do for your business now — get started now for free, view our comprehensive pricing plans , or book a demo today.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Teamwork.com: The all-in-one platform for client work

Learn how Teamwork.com helps you drive business efficiency, grow profits, and scale confidently.

Ben Brigden - Senior Content Marketing Specialist - Author

Ben is a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Teamwork.com. Having held content roles at agencies and SaaS companies for the past 8 years, Ben loves writing about the latest tech trends and work hacks in the agency space.

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What Is an Implementation Plan? (Template & Example Included)

ProjectManager

What Is Project Implementation?

Project implementation, or project execution, is the process of completing tasks to deliver a project successfully. These tasks are initially described in the project plan, a comprehensive document that covers all areas of project management. However, a secondary action plan, known as an implementation plan, should be created to help team members and project managers better execute and track the project .

What Is an Implementation Plan?

An implementation plan is a document that describes the necessary steps for the execution of a project. Implementation plans break down the project implementation process by defining the timeline, the teams and the resources that’ll be needed.

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Implementation Plan Template

Use this free Implementation Plan Template for Excel to manage your projects better.

Implementation Plan vs. Project Plan

A project plan is a comprehensive project management document that should describe everything about your project including the project schedule, project budget, scope management plan, risk management plan, stakeholder management plan and other important components. An implementation plan, on the other hand, is a simplified version of your project plan that includes only the information that’s needed by the team members who will actually participate in the project execution phase, such as their roles, responsibilities, daily tasks and deadlines.

Project management software like ProjectManager greatly simplifies the implementation planning process. Schedule and execute your implementation plan with our robust online Gantt charts. Assign work, link dependencies and track progress in real time with one chart. Plus, if your team wants to work with something other than a Gantt chart, our software offers four other project views for managing work: task lists, kanban boards, calendars and sheets. Try it for free today.

ProjectManager's Gantt chart is great for monitoring implementation plans

Key Steps In Project Implementation

Here are some of the key steps that you must oversee as a project manager during the project execution phase . Your project implementation plan should have the necessary components to help you achieve these steps.

1. Communicate Goals and Objectives

Once you’ve outlined the project goals and objectives, the next step is to ensure that the team understands them. For the project to succeed, there must be buy-in from the project team. A meeting is a good way to communicate this, though having project documents that they can refer to is also viable.

2. Define Team Roles and Responsibilities

The project manager will define the roles and responsibilities and communicate them to the project team . They should understand what they’re expected to do and who they can reach out to with questions about their work, all of which leads to a smooth-running project.

3. Establish the Success Criteria for Deliverables

The project deliverables need to meet quality standards, and to do this there must be a success criteria for handing off these deliverables. You want to have something in place to determine if the deliverable is what it’s supposed to be. The measurement is called a success criteria and it applies to any deliverable, whether it’s tangible or intangible.

4. Schedule Work on a Project Timeline

All projects require a schedule , which at its most basic is a start date and an end date for your project. In between those two points, you’ll have phases and tasks, which also have start and finish dates. To manage these deadlines, use a project timeline to visually map everything in one place.

5. Monitor Cost, Time and Performance

To make sure that you’re keeping to your schedule and budget, you need to keep a close eye on the project during the execution phase. Some of the things you should monitor are your costs, time and performance. Costs refer to your budget , time refers to your schedule and performance impacts both as well as quality. By keeping track of these metrics, you can make adjustments to stay on schedule and on budget.

6. Report to Project Stakeholders

While the project manager is monitoring the project, the stakeholders, who have a vested interest in the project, are also going to want to stay informed. To manage their expectations and show them that the project is hitting all its milestones, you’ll want to have project reports , such as project status reports. These can then be presented to the stakeholders regularly to keep them updated.

Free Implementation Plan Template

Many of the key components listed above are included in our implementation plan template . Use this Excel file to define your strategy, scope, resource plan, timeline and more. It’s the ideal way to begin your implementation process. Download your template today.

Implementation plan template for Excel

What Are the Key Components of an Implementation Plan?

There’s no standard one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to creating your implementation plan. However, we’ve created an implementation plan outline for your projects. Here are its components.

  • Project goals & objectives: The project goal is the ultimate goal of your project, while the objectives are the key milestones or achievements that must be completed to reach it.
  • Success criteria: The project manager must reach an agreement with stakeholders to define the project success criteria.
  • Project deliverables: Project deliverables are tangible or intangible outputs from project tasks.
  • Scope statement: The scope statement briefly describes your project scope, which can be simply defined as the project work to be performed.
  • Resource plan: Create a simple resource plan that outlines the human resources, equipment and materials needed for your project.
  • Risk analysis: Use a risk assessment tool like a SWOT analysis or risk register. There are different tools with different levels of detail for your risk analysis.
  • Implementation timeline: Any implementation plan needs a clear project timeline to be executed properly. You should use an advanced tool such as a Gantt chart to create one.
  • Implementation plan milestones: You need to identify key milestones of your implementation plan so that you can easily keep track of its progress.
  • Team roles & responsibilities: The implementation plan won’t execute itself. You’ll need to assign roles and responsibilities to your team members.
  • Implementation plan metrics: You’ll need KPIs, OKRs or any other performance metrics you can use to control the progress of your implementation plan.

How to Write an Implementation Plan

Follow these steps to create an implementation plan for your project or business. You can also consider using project management software like ProjectManager to help you with the implementation process.

1. Review Your Project Plan

Start by identifying what you’ll need for the execution of your implementation plan:

  • What teams need to be involved to achieve the strategic goals?
  • How long will it take to make the strategic goals happen?
  • What resources should be allocated ?

By interviewing stakeholders, key partners, customers and team members, you can determine the most crucial assignments needed and prioritize them accordingly. It’s also at this stage that you should list out all the goals you’re looking to achieve to cross-embed the strategic plan with the implementation plan. Everything must tie back to that strategic plan in order for your implementation plan to work.

2. Map Out Assumptions and Risks

This acts as an extension to the research and discovery phase, but it’s also important to point out assumptions and risks in your implementation plan. This can include anything that might affect the execution of the implementation plan, such as paid time off or holidays you didn’t factor into your timeline , budget constraints, losing personnel, market instability or even tools that require repair before your implementation can commence.

3. Identify Task Owners

Each activity in your implementation plan must include a primary task owner or champion to be the owner of it. For tasks to be properly assigned, this champion will need to do the delegating. This means that they ensure that all systems are working as per usual, keep track of their teams’ productivity and more. Project planning software is practically essential for this aspect.

4. Define Project Tasks

Next, you need to finalize all the little activities to round out your plan. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

  • What are the steps or milestones that make up the plan?
  • What are the activities needed to complete each step?
  • Who needs to be involved in the plan?
  • What are the stakeholder requirements?
  • What resources should be allocated?
  • Are there any milestones we need to list?
  • What are the risks involved based on the assumptions we notated?
  • Are there any dependencies for any of the tasks?

Once all activities are outlined, all resources are listed and all stakeholders have approved (but no actions have been taken just yet), you can consider your implementation plan complete and ready for execution.

Implementation Plan Example

Implementation plans are used by companies across industries on a daily basis. Here’s a simple project implementation plan example we’ve created using ProjectManager to help you better understand how implementation plans work. Let’s imagine a software development team is creating a new app.

  • Project goal: Create a new app
  • Project objectives: All the project deliverables that must be achieved to reach that ultimate goal.
  • Success criteria: The development team needs to communicate with the project stakeholders and agree upon success criteria.
  • Scope statement: Here’s where the development team will document all the work needed to develop the app. That work is broken down into tasks, which are known as user stories in product and software development. Here, the team must also note all the exceptions, which means everything that won’t be done.
  • Resource plan: In this case, the resources are all the professionals involved in the software development process, as well as any equipment needed by the team.
  • Risk analysis: Using a risk register, the product manager can list all the potential risks that might affect the app development process.
  • Timeline, milestones and metrics: Here’s an image of an implementation plan timeline we created using ProjectManager’s Gantt chart view. The diamond symbols represent the implementation plan milestones.
  • Team roles & responsibilities: Similarly, we used a kanban board to assign implementation plan tasks to team members according to their roles and responsibilities.

Benefits of an Implementation Plan for the Project Implementation Process

The implementation plan plays a large role in the success of your overall strategic plan. But more than that, communicating both your strategic plan and the implementation of it therein to your team members helps them feel as if they have a sense of ownership within the company’s long-term direction.

Increased Cooperation

An implementation plan that’s well communicated also helps to increase cooperation across all teams through all the steps of the implementation process. It’s easy to work in a silo—you know exactly what your daily process is and how to execute it. But reaching across the aisle and making sure your team is aligned on the project goals that you’re also trying to meet? That’s another story entirely. With an implementation plan in place, it helps to bridge the divide just a little easier.

Additionally, with an implementation plan that’s thoroughly researched and well-defined, you can ensure buy-in from stakeholders and key partners involved in the project. And no matter which milestone you’re at, you can continue to get that buy-in time and time again with proper documentation.

At the end of the day, the biggest benefit of an implementation plan is that it makes it that much easier for the company to meet its long-term goals. When everyone across all teams knows exactly what you want to accomplish and how to do it, it’s easy to make it happen.

Implementation Plan FAQ

There’s more to know about implementation plans. It’s a big subject and we’ve tried to be thorough as possible, but if you have any further questions, hopefully we’ve answered them below.

What Is the Difference Between an Action Plan and an Implementation Plan?

The main difference between an action plan and an implementation plan is that an action plan focuses exclusively on describing work packages and tasks, while the implementation plan is more holistic and addresses other variables that affect the implementation process such as risks, resources and team roles & responsibilities.

What Is an Implementation Plan in Business?

A business implementation plan is the set of steps that a company follows to execute its strategic plan and achieve all the business goals that are described there.

What Is an Implementation Plan in Project Management?

Implementation plans have many uses in project management. They’re a planning tool that allows project managers to control smaller projects within their project plan. For example, they might need an implementation plan to execute risk mitigation actions, change requests or produce specific deliverables.

How to Make an Implementation Plan With ProjectManager

Creating and managing an implementation plan is a huge responsibility and one that requires diligence, patience and great organizational skills.

When it comes to a project implementation plan, there are many ways to make one that’s best suited for your team. With ProjectManager , you get access to both agile and waterfall planning so you can plan in sprints for large or small projects, track issues and collaborate easily. Try kanban boards for managing backlogs or for making workflows in departments.

A screenshot of the Kanban board project view

Switching up the activities after a milestone meeting with stakeholders? You can easily update your implementation plan with our software features. Add new tasks, set due dates, and track how far along your team is on their current activities.

Implementation plans are the backbone of an organization’s strategic overall plan. With ProjectManager, give your organization the project management software they need to gain insight into all resources needed, view activities on their lists and collaborate with ease. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

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Home

Introduction to implementation research

  • Introduction
  • The audience for this toolkit
  • Relevance of IR for improved access and delivery of interventions
  • The purpose of this Toolkit
  • Research teams
  • Self-assessment and reflection activities

Understanding implementation research

  • The need for IR
  • Outcomes of IR
  • Characteristics of IR
  • How IR works
  • Community engagement in IR
  • Ethical challenges in IR

Developing an Implementation Research Proposal

  • The team and the research challenge
  • Structure of an IR proposal
  • Components of an IR proposal
  • Research Design
  • Project plan
  • Impact and measuring project results
  • Supplements
  • Funding an IR project
  • Common problems with applications

Research methods and data management

  • Study design for IR projects
  • Selecting research methods
  • Mixed methods
  • Research tools and techniques
  • Data collection
  • Data management
  • Data analysis

IR-Planning and Conducting IR

  • Project planning
  • Project monitoring plan
  • Developing a logic model
  • Developing monitoring questions
  • Data use and reporting
  • Project execution
  • Ethical issues
  • Good practices in planning and conducting IR

IR-related communications and advocacy

  • Productive Dialogue
  • Knowledge Translation
  • Research Evidence: Barriers and Facilitators to Uptake
  • Policy Advocacy and Strategic Communications
  • Data Presentation and Visualization
  • Developing a Communication Strategy
  • Steps in Developing a Communication Strategy
  • Communication materials and Platforms

Integrating implementation research into health systems

  • Start up, mapping and convening
  • Productive dialogue
  • Ownership, trust, responsibilities and roles
  • Setting priorities, defining problems and research questions
  • Capacity strengthening
  • Uptake of findings
  • Documentation
  • Using the WHO Health Systems Framework in IR
  • Principles of sustainability

Developing implementation research projects with an intersectional gender lens

  • Integrating an intersectional gender lens in IR
  • Proposal development with an intersectional gender lens
  • Execution of an IR project with an intersectional gender lens
  • Good practices in IR projects with an intersectional gender perspective

TDR Implementation research toolkit

This module is designed as an aid to the development of a high quality implementation research (IR) proposal by a research team. It draws extensively and builds upon the content of the proposal development module in the first edition of this toolkit. 1

Although there are certain elements that are common to various types of research proposals, some aspects are emphasized in this module to guide the process of developing a proposal designed to address barriers to optimizing the effectiveness of a given health intervention, policy or strategy that form the basis of an IR ‘problem’.

research project implementation plan

If your team is embarking on the development of an IR proposal and are unsure where to begin, rest assured you are not alone! Even defining the research question can seem overwhelming at the outset. The purpose of this module is to help team members understand the process and take each of the individual steps involved in writing an IR proposal.

The content and activities in this module are organized into a series of sections, each addressing a specific element of an IR proposal in a step-wise process. Respective sections comprise the following elements:

  • Identifying what you will accomplish by the end of each section.
  • Essential information to help you understand the specific steps in proposal writing.
  • Exercises to facilitate your understanding and put ideas into practice.
  • Reflection opportunities for you to consider specific issues in relation to your project, and explore how successive ideas should be incorporated into your team’s evolving proposal and thinking.

Overall, the module provides harmonized guidelines for proposal development, recognizing that an IR team includes members from diverse backgrounds. Many users are likely to be seasoned researchers or at least have some research experience.

references

TDR Implementation research toolkit (Second edition)

  • Acknowledgements
  • Self-assessment tool
  • © Photo credit
  • Download PDF version
  • Download offline site

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Strategies for Implementing Implementation Science: A Methodologic Overview

Margaret a handley.

1 Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA.

Anuradha Gorukanti

2 Saint Louis University School of Medicine, St Louis, Missouri, USA.

Adithya Cattamanchi

3 Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA.

“All break through, no follow through ” – S Woolf Washington Post editorial 2006 on the need to close the gaps in the US health care delivery system ( 1 )

What is implementation science?

The gap between care that is effective and care that is delivered reflects, in large measure, the paucity of evidence about implementation ( 2 ). Implementation science is the systematic study of how to design and evaluate a set of activities to facilitate successful uptake of an evidence-based health intervention. ‘Evidence-based’ refers to interventions that have undergone sufficient scientific evaluation to be considered effective and/or are recommended by respected public health or professional organizations. As noted by Madon et al, “Scientists have been slow to view implementation as a dynamic, adaptive, multi-scale phenomenon that can be addressed through a research agenda” ( 3 ). But the tide is changing, with funding agencies increasingly recognizing the need to support research to guide implementation. Implementation science seeks to understand factors that determine why an evidence-based intervention may or may not be adopted within specific healthcare or public health settings, and uses this information to develop and test strategies to improve the speed, quantity and quality of uptake ( 4 ). Other terms – such as knowledge translation – are also used to describe research to understand factors important to evidence uptake. The journal Implementation Science defines implementation research as “ the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of proven clinical treatments, practices, organizational, and management interventions into routine practice, and hence to improve health. In this context, it includes the study of influences on patient, healthcare professional, and organizational behavior in either healthcare or population settings.” ( http://www.implementationscience.com/about ).

In the field of Emergency Medicine, as indicated by the scoping review by Tavender and colleagues ( 5 ), a growing number of studies characterize evidence-practice gaps in areas such as head trauma, management of sepsis, and acute pulmonary care, primarily asthma. However, few studies to date have identified barriers and facilitators to implementation of evidence-based practice which use behavioral theory to guide development of implementation strategies, or employ rigorous evaluation designs to determine whether–and importantly, why– strategies to reverse the gap are effective – the cornerstones of implementation science. A key reason for the persistent gaps between evidence and practice across all areas of medicine is that there have been few attempts to identify or target factors critical for successful implementation of an evidence-based intervention. There is either no explicit implementation strategy or the strategy is based on a best guess rather than on a systematic assessment of crucial barriers and enablers. A different approach is needed to close the evidence-practice gap and thereby achieve the triple aim of improved health, improved patient experience, and reduced health care costs. Uptake of evidence-based practices in emergency medicine, as well as many other disciplines in medicine, calls for an increased focus on implementation science research.

What are the key aspects of implementation science?

Although it is a relatively new field, implementation science explicitly focuses on mechanisms of change in order to understand and improve the process of implementation. We believe that research to close the evidence-practice gap should be guided by the following three key principles:

1) Behavior change is inherent to the translation of evidence into practice, policy, and public health improvements. In order to effectively engage in implementation science research, it is necessary to understand the role of behavior change in developing and evaluating an implementation strategy. In most situations, an evidence-practice gap exists because individuals or organizations are not doing something that is recommended. Strategies that encourage providers to follow clinical practice guidelines, patients to improve medication adherence, or communities to increase uptake of screening programs can all be considered “behavior change interventions”, as they are designated, coordinated activities intended to change specific behaviors. Behavioral theory is therefore helpful to understand the determinants of current behaviors and to design and evaluate targeted implementation strategies to achieve the desired change ( 6 , 7 ).

One example of how behavioural theory is used to structure understanding of barriers and develop implementation strategies is the COM-B model and the related Behavior Change Wheel (BCW) ( 6 ). The COM-B model specifies that changing the occurrence of any behavior requires changing C apability, O pportunity and/ or M otivation. ‘Capability’ refers to the ability to engage in the thoughts or physical processes necessary for the behavior, ‘Opportunity’ relates to factors in the environment or social setting that influence behavior, and ‘Motivation’ is the conscious beliefs as well as unconsciously based emotions/impulses, that direct behavior ( 6 ). Thus the Com-B model can be used to “diagnose” why the desired behavior is not occurring. Once a behavior is understood in terms of these three domains, the BCW can be used to identify functions that an effective intervention could deliver to overcome barriers or enhance enablers within each domain (for example, functions such as education or training to increase ‘Capability’). The BCW goes on to identify evidence-based behavior change techniques that can be used to enact different intervention functions (for example, counseling or health coaching to deliver education). In doing so, the BCW provides a common language to understand, describe, and target behavior change across different contexts and health problems. Implementation Science approaches such as the COM-B diagnosis make explicit the thinking about behavioral barriers to an evidence-practice gap. This explicitness is thought to help improve the relevance (and therefore effect) of interventions in their specific settings as well as generalizability of behavior change interventions across settings.

2) Engagement with a range of individuals and stakeholder organizations is imperative to achieve effective translation and sustained improvement in implementation outcomes . Historically, many initiatives to promote healthy behaviors and improve the quality of health care delivery have been implemented without direct input from targeted individuals/communities ( 8 , 9 ). In contrast, in community-engaged research, community input is incorporated into the development of the question, execution of the project, analysis of the results and/or dissemination of the findings ( 10 ). A fundamental premise of community-engaged research is that community stakeholders have credible, intimate and necessary understandings of the concerns, values, assets and activities of their communities.

The initial steps to starting a community-engaged research project is to identify groups or relationships relevant to your area of research and to make efforts to connect with them to start a conversation about the evidence-practice gaps or health topics you care about and to see if these are important or of interest to them. Stakeholders will vary depending on the research question and can include individuals (patients, providers, community members etc), delivery systems (clinics, hospitals) and others (payers, government agencies, funders, etc) ( 10 ). Community-engaged research can occur on a spectrum from “more intensive” to “less intensive.” A “more intensive” degree of community-engaged research would involve stakeholder collaboration in all aspects of the research. A “less intensive” approach to community-engaged research would seek stakeholder input for specific steps of the study. By incorporating stakeholder input and participation in research, the results generated are more likely to be useful and applicable for the intended communities.

3) Implementation science research benefits from flexibility and often non-linear approaches in order to fit within real world situations. In practice, this means that a cyclical, rather than linear, approach and long-term view are necessary. This is because translating evidence into practice requires attention to real-world settings in which many contextual variables will influence the implementation process and require re-visiting earlier steps in the process. For example, new barriers can become apparent over time or reflect changes in the environment, such as the addition of new guidelines or technologies, that impact the processes involved in the behavior. ( 11 ).

What steps are involved in implementation science research?

In this section we describe a step-wise approach to conducting implementation science research across three phases: 1) pre-implementation planning (engaging stakeholders and making the case for evidence translation), 2) implementation strategy design (using behavioral theory/frameworks to identify barriers and facilitators to implementation and guide development of implementation strategies) and 3) implementation strategy evaluation (employing rigorous evaluation designs to determine whether strategies to reverse the gap are effective and why or why not) ( Table 1 ). We describe the activities involved in each phase, and provide an example related to the prescription of controller medications to children presenting to the emergency department with an asthma exacerbation that links these activities with the three principles outlined above.

Steps for Conducting Implementation Science and Pre-Intervention Planning Research

Pre-implementation Planning:

Pre-implementation planning begins with identifying the evidence to be translated (health-related behavior, test, procedure, etc.) and its relation to a health problem. The case for translation is strongest when the effectiveness of the practice change has been clearly demonstrated in clinical trials and/or the practice is recommended by professional societies or other professional organizations. To make the case for translation, it is helpful to describe the evidence-practice gap in terms of performance and outcome gaps .

The performance gap is the difference between current and ideal practice/behavior, ideally in the setting in which the research is taking place. An example of how the theory-based behavioral components of the COM-B model might be used is found in Figure 1 depicting the problem of provision of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) by ED physicians to pediatric patients with persistent asthma. In this figure, examples of capability, motivation, and opportunity-related barriers and enablers are shown.Existing literature and internal data sources can be used to identify the evidence-practice gap, (e.g. pediatric ED providers do not prescribe inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) for patients being seen for asthma exacerbations despite evidence-based recommendations and guidelines) and create an initial version of the COM-B model to understand the behavior of non-prescribing of ICS in context For example, a well-known motivational barrier identified in the literature may be that there are well-known competing demands in the hectic ED environment, making it difficult to add any practice change interventions. Approaches that can be used to complete this COM-B diagnosis for a particular setting include observation, surveys, administrative data reviews, and in-depth interviews, as well as other approaches. In this example, additional barriers that may not have been considered may only be understood from a careful study of the ED physicians behavior in the particular setting of your work. The process of engaging front-line physicians in understanding COM-B related contributors to the problem can be seen as community engagement strategy, and others may also be relevant to the question under investigation..

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Applying COM-B to the provision of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) to pediatric patients with persistent asthma by ED physicians

The outcome gap is determined as the difference between current health outcomes and those that are expected to be achieved with if the recommended practice were observed. In our example this would be that when children with moderate to severe asthma are not prescribed ICS at ED discharge, patient-centered care is compromised; patients have poorly controlled asthma and decreased quality of life, and the likelihood of unscheduled ED visits and their accompanying costs rises. The outcome gap represents the potential improvements in healthcare quality (safety, effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and equity) or healthcare costs that could be achieved if the practice variation was reduced. The case for translation can be further strengthened by indicating why the health problem the intervention seeks to improve is a priority in the setting in which the research will take place or to the funder of the evidence translation project.

It undertaking an implementation-focused research endevour it is essential to also identify and engage potential stakeholders across levels (providers, patients, community systems, policy makers) in order to assess readiness for change and whether there is adequate consensus that the evidence is ready to be translated and that the health problem is part of strategic priorities. In this example, it would be essential at the outset to engage the physicians as stakeholder community to improve an understanding of barriers they face to prescribing- for example, to understand what ICS means prescribing to them and if they feel well trained to prescribe. It is also likely that patients and their families as well as ED staff are other important stakeholder community groups, and it could be also important to include pharmacists as stakeholders, to identify any barriers relevant to the nature of the prescription process. Stakeholder engagement can also involve identifying and reaching out to local programs or resources that can be utilized to facilitate implementation and ensure sustainability after the research is completed. It is also important to consider and acknowledge any potential unintended negative consequences that may arise as a result of changing current practice conditions.

Designing the Implementation Strategy:

Implementation science promotes a systematic approach to designing a strategy to facilitate uptake of an evidence based-intervention. The systematic approach includes: 1) Identifying behaviors contributing to the evidence-practice gap; 2) Identifying key determinants of current behavior and the desired behavior change using a theoretical framework and 3) Selecting components of the implementation strategy that target the key determinants (using the chosen theory or framework). Designing an implementation strategy begins with listing the specific behaviors that need to occur to facilitate uptake of an evidence-based intervention, and then selecting one or more target behaviors to focus on. The target behaviors should be specified in as detailed a manner as possible (who needs to do what differently, when, where, how, with whom?) ( 6 , 12 ). The specification enables assessment of key barriers and enablers of the target behavior(s). This step should be guided by a behavioral theory or framework and frequently involves qualitative research. Last, potential behavior change techniques (including from other fields such as Quality Improvement) can be mapped to key barriers and enablers again using behavior change theory or frameworks. For example, Mitchie et al have identified 93 distinct behavior change techniques and described their usefulness for targeting specific determinants of behavior change. Again at this stage, consultation with local stakeholders is critical to ensure that selected techniques and their delivery are feasible, relevant, and acceptable. When possible, policy or structural changes that can enable behavior change should also be considered.

Following the COM-B diagnosis ( Figure 1 ), the BCW framework can be employed to determine which intervention function(s) might best address the barriers in the context studied. For example, the motivational barrier about competing demands might be addressed in several ways including: restructuring the environment (to free up time to discuss future medication planning for selected asthma encounters and thereby change the perception that there are too many competing demands), persuading physicians that their professional identity includes prevention (to increase a sense of ownership over prevention of asthma), or promoting goal setting about ICS prescribing (to improve confidence in ability to integrate ICSF prescribing into ED practice settings). Once the choice of intervention function is made, the final step in the behavior change focused intervention planning would be to select a delivery strategy, the “behavior change technique.” For example, if the intervention function of persuasion is selected, there could be trained role models who could provide information and serve as credible resources about the importance of the behavior; and physicians could receive feedback on ICS prescribing behavior. If an implementation strategy involved increasing motivation by providing prompts or cues, an electronic medical record could be used to delivery prompts, particularly if this was guided by information in the medical record suggesting ICS for appropriate patients. (On the other hand, rapid proliferation of electronic prompts might render a prompt related to ICS prescription less effective.) Being able to incorporate flexible strategies to deliver intervention content may be important in order to adapt to broader changes in the setting the intervention is planned for.

Evaluating the Implementation Strategy:

The evaluation of an implementation strategy should focus on 1) Process – how components of the strategy were delivered or adapted and the fidelity to intervention components and principles; 2) Mediators of change – whether the components modified targeted barriers or enhanced targeted enablers; and 3) Outcomes – frequently, whether uptake of the evidence-based intervention increased (or decreased if de-implementation is the goal). These forms of evaluation can be summarized as “process evaluation”- how well the intervention is being implemented and “summative evaluation”- whether change occurred as a result of the intervention. Health outcomes can also include those related to the quality of healthcare (safety, effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and equity) when feasible, but in general it should already be known that uptake of the evidence-based intervention improves healthcare quality. Evaluation frameworks such as the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance) framework can be helpful to guide the selection of process and health outcomes evaluated (see www.re-aim.org for examples)( 13 ). In addition to using frameworks in the evaluation process, it can be important to consider pros and cons of experimental vs quasi-experimental designs, and whether or not qualitative research would enhance the ability to fully understand the effects of the implementation, such as how well the persuasion efforts of peer role models reflect trainings or protocols, or what factors may have led to unintended consequences or spillover effects.

In a proposed study above that incorporates the use of persuasion tinto an intervention to increase ICS prescribing to pediatric asthma patients in urban ED settings (as with having trained role models as credible sources), it may be important to examine to measures of reach, in addition to effectiveness. To do this might involve determining to what extent the intervention reached specific population targeted in the ED setting such as younger physicians or women, or those working in smaller vs larger ED. Adoption measures could be important to see if in a study including large numbers of different types of ED settings, if there are some settings where the intervention practices became part of the practice expectations, in contrast to other settings that did not so readily adopt the intervention. This could provide guidance for on-going trainings and reinforcements unique to particular environments.

There are many commonalities between implementation science and both Quality Improvement (QI) and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), but there are some important differences as well. According to current implementation science thinking, and shown in the COM-B examples, the behavioral diagnosis and steps to address barriers to critical behaviors that affect the implementation process are central to ImS, whereas in QI and M&E they often are not. Additionally, the goals of QI research are often less focused on creating generalizable knowledge than on addressing the QI problem at hand. Implementation science focuses more on understanding the etiology of gaps between expected results and observed outcomes, in ways that can be relevant beyond a given situation, whereas QI and M&E research may stop once identification and barriers related to performance of specific projects are determined. Despite these differences, many QI and M&E-related research studies are aligned with implementation science principles and these disciplinary distinctions are not always relevant.

As in other disciplines, there are wide gaps in the uptake of a range of evidence-based interventions in emergency medicine. Studies are now needed that employ theory-based approaches to understand key behavioral determinants and to design, evaluate and adapt targeted implementation strategies that address the targeted behaviors. These studies should be conducted with broad involvement from multiple relevant stakeholders, should engage multiple disciplinary perspectives, and should be facilitated by research designs and selection of outcomes that best enable implementation research questions to be addressed. Moving forward will require increasing knowledge about implementation science among trainees and practitioners as well as sustained efforts to expand the capacity of emergency medicine researchers to address the implementation research questions that merit focused attention.

  • Open access
  • Published: 25 September 2020

The Implementation Research Logic Model: a method for planning, executing, reporting, and synthesizing implementation projects

  • Justin D. Smith   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3264-8082 1 , 2 ,
  • Dennis H. Li 3 &
  • Miriam R. Rafferty 4  

Implementation Science volume  15 , Article number:  84 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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A Letter to the Editor to this article was published on 17 November 2021

Numerous models, frameworks, and theories exist for specific aspects of implementation research, including for determinants, strategies, and outcomes. However, implementation research projects often fail to provide a coherent rationale or justification for how these aspects are selected and tested in relation to one another. Despite this need to better specify the conceptual linkages between the core elements involved in projects, few tools or methods have been developed to aid in this task. The Implementation Research Logic Model (IRLM) was created for this purpose and to enhance the rigor and transparency of describing the often-complex processes of improving the adoption of evidence-based interventions in healthcare delivery systems.

The IRLM structure and guiding principles were developed through a series of preliminary activities with multiple investigators representing diverse implementation research projects in terms of contexts, research designs, and implementation strategies being evaluated. The utility of the IRLM was evaluated in the course of a 2-day training to over 130 implementation researchers and healthcare delivery system partners.

Preliminary work with the IRLM produced a core structure and multiple variations for common implementation research designs and situations, as well as guiding principles and suggestions for use. Results of the survey indicated a high utility of the IRLM for multiple purposes, such as improving rigor and reproducibility of projects; serving as a “roadmap” for how the project is to be carried out; clearly reporting and specifying how the project is to be conducted; and understanding the connections between determinants, strategies, mechanisms, and outcomes for their project.

Conclusions

The IRLM is a semi-structured, principle-guided tool designed to improve the specification, rigor, reproducibility, and testable causal pathways involved in implementation research projects. The IRLM can also aid implementation researchers and implementation partners in the planning and execution of practice change initiatives. Adaptation and refinement of the IRLM are ongoing, as is the development of resources for use and applications to diverse projects, to address the challenges of this complex scientific field.

Peer Review reports

Contributions to the literature

Drawing from and integrating existing frameworks, models, and theories, the IRLM advances the traditional logic model for the requirements of implementation research and practice.

The IRLM provides a means of describing the complex relationships between critical elements of implementation research and practice in a way that can be used to improve the rigor and reproducibility of research and implementation practice, and the testing of theory.

The IRLM offers researchers and partners a useful tool for the purposes of planning, executing, reporting, and synthesizing processes and findings across the stages of implementation projects.

In response to a call for addressing noted problems with transparency, rigor, openness, and reproducibility in biomedical research [ 1 ], the National Institutes of Health issued guidance in 2014 pertaining to the research it funds ( https://www.nih.gov/research-training/rigor-reproducibility ). The field of implementation science has similarly recognized a need for better specification with similar intent [ 2 ]. However, integrating the necessary conceptual elements of implementation research, which often involves multiple models, frameworks, and theories, is an ongoing challenge. A conceptually grounded organizational tool could improve rigor and reproducibility of implementation research while offering additional utility for the field.

This article describes the development and application of the Implementation Research Logic Model (IRLM). The IRLM can be used with various types of implementation studies and at various stages of research, from planning and executing to reporting and synthesizing implementation studies. Example IRLMs are provided for various common study designs and scenarios, including hybrid designs and studies involving multiple service delivery systems [ 3 , 4 ]. Last, we describe the preliminary use of the IRLM and provide results from a post-training evaluation. An earlier version of this work was presented at the 2018 AcademyHealth/NIH Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation in Health, and the abstract appeared in the Implementation Science [ 5 ].

Specification challenges in implementation research

Having an imprecise understanding of what was done and why during the implementation of a new innovation obfuscates identifying the factors responsible for successful implementation and prevents learning from what contributed to failed implementation. Thus, improving the specification of phenomena in implementation research is necessary to inform our understanding of how implementation strategies work, for whom, under what determinant conditions, and on what implementation and clinical outcomes. One challenge is that implementation science uses numerous models and frameworks (hereafter, “frameworks”) to describe, organize, and aid in understanding the complexity of changing practice patterns and integrating evidence-based health interventions across systems [ 6 ]. These frameworks typically address implementation determinants, implementation process, or implementation evaluation [ 7 ]. Although many frameworks incorporate two or more of these broad purposes, researchers often find it necessary to use more than one to describe the various aspects of an implementation research study. The conceptual connections and relationships between multiple frameworks are often difficult to describe and to link to theory [ 8 ].

Similarly, reporting guidelines exist for some of these implementation research components, such as strategies [ 9 ] and outcomes [ 10 ], as well as for entire studies (i.e., Standards for Reporting Implementation Studies [ 11 ]); however, they generally help describe the individual components and not their interactions. To facilitate causal modeling [ 12 ], which can be used to elucidate mechanisms of change and the processes involved in both successful and unsuccessful implementation research projects, investigators must clearly define the relations among variables in ways that are testable with research studies [ 13 ]. Only then can we open the “black box” of how specific implementation strategies operate to predict outcomes.

  • Logic models

Logic models, graphic depictions that present the shared relationships among various elements of a program or study, have been used for decades in program development and evaluation [ 14 ] and are often required by funding agencies when proposing studies involving implementation [ 15 ]. Used to develop agreement among diverse stakeholders of the “what” and the “how” of proposed and ongoing projects, logic models have been shown to improve planning by highlighting theoretical and practical gaps, support the development of meaningful process indicators for tracking, and aid in both reproducing successful studies and identifying failures of unsuccessful studies [ 16 ]. They are also useful at other stages of research and for program implementation, such as organizing a project/grant application/study protocol, presenting findings from a completed project, and synthesizing the findings of multiple projects [ 17 ].

Logic models can also be used in the context of program theory, an explicit statement of how a project/strategy/intervention/program/policy is understood to contribute to a chain of intermediate results that eventually produce the intended/observed impacts [ 18 ]. Program theory specifies both a Theory of Change (i.e., the central processes or drivers by which change comes about following a formal theory or tacit understanding) and a Theory of Action (i.e., how program components are constructed to activate the Theory of Change) [ 16 ]. Inherent within program theory is causal chain modeling. In implementation research, Fernandez et al. [ 19 ] applied mapping methods to implementation strategies to postulate the ways in which changes to the system affect downstream implementation and clinical outcomes. Their work presents an implementation mapping logic model based on Proctor et al. [ 20 , 21 ], which is focused primarily on the selection of implementation strategy(s) rather than a complete depiction of the conceptual model linking all implementation research elements (i.e., determinants, strategies, mechanisms of action, implementation outcomes, clinical outcomes) in the detailed manner we describe in this article.

Development of the IRLM

The IRLM began out of a recognition that implementation research presents some unique challenges due to the field’s distinct and still codifying terminology [ 22 ] and its use of implementation-specific and non-specific (borrowed from other fields) theories, models, and frameworks [ 7 ]. The development of the IRLM occurred through a series of case applications. This began with a collaboration between investigators at Northwestern University and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in which the IRLM was used to study the implementation of a new model of patient care in a new hospital and in other related projects [ 23 ]. Next, the IRLM was used with three already-funded implementation research projects to plan for and describe the prospective aspects of the trials, as well as with an ongoing randomized roll-out implementation trial of the Collaborative Care Model for depression management [Smith JD, Fu E, Carroll AJ, Rado J, Rosenthal LJ, Atlas JA, Burnett-Zeigler I, Carlo, A, Jordan N, Brown CH, Csernansky J: Collaborative care for depression management in primary care: a randomized rollout trial using a type 2 hybrid effectiveness-implementation design submitted for publication]. It was also applied in the later stages of a nearly completed implementation research project of a family-based obesity management intervention in pediatric primary care to describe what had occurred over the course of the 3-year trial [ 24 ]. Last, the IRLM was used as a training tool in a 2-day training with 63 grantees of NIH-funded planning project grants funded as part of the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative [ 25 ]. Results from a survey of the participants in the training are reported in the “Results” section. From these preliminary activities, we identified a number of ways that the IRLM could be used, described in the section on “Using the IRLM for different purposes and stages of research.”

The Implementation Research Logic Model

In developing the IRLM, we began with the common “pipeline” logic model format used by AHRQ, CDC, NIH, PCORI, and others [ 16 ]. This structure was chosen due to its familiarity with funders, investigators, readers, and reviewers. Although a number of characteristics of the pipeline logic model can be applied to implementation research studies, there is an overall misfit due to implementation research’s focusing on the systems that support adoption and delivery of health practices; involving multiple levels within one or more systems; and having its own unique terminology and frameworks [ 3 , 22 , 26 ]. We adapted the typical evaluation logic model to integrate existing implementation science frameworks as its core elements while keeping to the same aim of facilitating causal modeling.

The most common IRLM format is depicted in Fig. 1 . Additional File A1 is a Fillable PDF version of Fig. 1 . In certain situations, it might be preferable to include the evidence-based intervention (EBI; defined as a clinical, preventive, or educational protocol or a policy, principle, or practice whose effects are supported by research [ 27 ]) (Fig. 2 ) to demonstrate alignment of contextual factors (determinants) and strategies with the components and characteristics of the clinical intervention/policy/program and to disentangle it from the implementation strategies. Foremost in these indications are “home-grown” interventions, whose components and theory of change may not have been previously described, and novel interventions that are early in the translational pipeline, which may require greater detail for the reader/reviewer. Variant formats are provided as Additional Files A 2 to A 4 for use with situations and study designs commonly encountered in implementation research, including comparative implementation studies (A 2 ), studies involving multiple service contexts (A 3 ), and implementation optimization designs (A 4 ). Further, three illustrative IRLMs are provided, with brief descriptions of the projects and the utility of the IRLM (A 5 , A 6 and A 7 ).

figure 1

Implementation Research Logic Model (IRLM) Standard Form. Notes. Domain names in the determinants section were drawn from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. The format of the outcomes column is from Proctor et al. 2011

figure 2

Implementation Research Logic Model (IRLM) Standard Form with Intervention. Notes. Domain names in the determinants section were drawn from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. The format of the outcomes column is from Proctor et al. 2011

Core elements and theory

The IRLM specifies the relationships between determinants of implementation, implementation strategies, the mechanisms of action resulting from the strategies, and the implementation and clinical outcomes affected. These core elements are germane to every implementation research project in some way. Accordingly, the generalized theory of the IRLM posits that (1) implementation strategies selected for a given EBI are related to implementation determinants (context-specific barriers and facilitators), (2) strategies work through specific mechanisms of action to change the context or the behaviors of those within the context, and (3) implementation outcomes are the proximal impacts of the strategy and its mechanisms, which then relate to the clinical outcomes of the EBI. Articulated in part by others [ 9 , 12 , 21 , 28 , 29 ], this causal pathway theory is largely explanatory and details the Theory of Change and the Theory of Action of the implementation strategies in a single model. The EBI Theory of Action can also be displayed within a modified IRLM (see Additional File A 4 ). We now briefly describe the core elements and discuss conceptual challenges in how they relate to one another and to the overall goals of implementation research.

Determinants

Determinants of implementation are factors that might prevent or enable implementation (i.e., barriers and facilitators). Determinants may act as moderators, “effect modifiers,” or mediators, thus indicating that they are links in a chain of causal mechanisms [ 12 ]. Common determinant frameworks are the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) [ 30 ] and the Theoretical Domains Framework [ 31 ].

Implementation strategies

Implementation strategies are supports, changes to, and interventions on the system to increase adoption of EBIs into usual care [ 32 ]. Consideration of determinants is commonly used when selecting and tailoring implementation strategies [ 28 , 29 , 33 ]. Providing the theoretical or conceptual reasoning for strategy selection is recommended [ 9 ]. The IRLM can be used to specify the proposed relationships between strategies and the other elements (determinants, mechanisms, and outcomes) and assists with considering, planning, and reporting all strategies in place during an implementation research project that could contribute to the outcomes and resulting changes

Because implementation research occurs within dynamic delivery systems with multiple factors that determine success or failure, the field has experienced challenges identifying consistent links between individual barriers and specific strategies to overcome them. For example, the Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC) compilation of strategies [ 32 ] was used to determine which strategies would best address contextual barriers identified by CFIR [ 29 ]. An online CFIR–ERIC matching process completed by implementation researchers and practitioners resulted in a large degree of heterogeneity and few consistent relationships between barrier and strategy, meaning the relationship is rarely one-to-one (e.g., a single strategy is often is linked to multiple barriers; more than one strategy needed to address a single barrier). Moreover, when implementation outcomes are considered, researchers often find that to improve one outcome, more than one contextual barrier needs to be addressed, which might in turn require one or more strategies.

Frequently, the reporting of implementation research studies focuses on the strategy or strategies that were introduced for the research study, without due attention to other strategies already used in the system or additional supporting strategies that might be needed to implement the target strategy. The IRLM allows for the comprehensive specification of all introduced and present strategies, as well as their changes (adaptations, additions, discontinuations) during the project.

Mechanisms of action

Mechanisms of action are processes or events through which an implementation strategy operates to affect desired implementation outcomes [ 12 ]. The mechanism can be a change in a determinant, a proximal implementation outcome, an aspect of the implementation strategy itself, or a combination of these in a multiple-intervening-effect model. An example of a causal process might be using training and fidelity monitoring strategies to improve delivery agents’ knowledge and self-efficacy about the EBI in response to knowledge-related barriers in the service delivery system. This could result in raising their acceptability of the EBI, increase the likelihood of adoption, improve the fidelity of delivery, and lead to sustainment. Relatively, few implementation studies formally test mechanisms of action, but this area of investigation has received significant attention more recently as the necessity to understand how strategies operate grows in the field [ 33 , 34 , 35 ].

Implementation outcomes are the effects of deliberate and purposive actions to implement new treatments, practices, and services [ 21 ]. They can be indicators of implementation processes, or key intermediate outcomes in relation to service, or target clinical outcomes. Glasgow et al. [ 36 , 37 , 38 ] describe the interrelated nature of implementation outcomes as occurring in a logical, but not necessarily linear, sequence of adoption by a delivery agent, delivery of the innovation with fidelity, reach of the innovation to the intended population, and sustainment of the innovation over time. The combined impact of these nested outcomes, coupled with the size of the effect of the EBI, determines the population or public health impact of implementation [ 36 ]. Outcomes earlier in the sequence can be conceptualized as mediators and mechanisms of strategies on later implementation outcomes. Specifying which strategies are theoretically intended to affect which outcomes, through which mechanisms of action, is crucial for improving the rigor and reproducibility of implementation research and to testing theory.

Using the Implementation Research Logic Model

Guiding principles.

One of the critical insights from our preliminary work was that the use of the IRLM should be guided by a set of principles rather than governed by rules. These principles are intended to be flexible both to allow for adaptation to the various types of implementation studies and evolution of the IRLM over time and to address concerns in the field of implementation science regarding specification, rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of design and process [ 5 ]. Given this flexibility of use, the IRLM will invariably require accompanying text and other supporting documents. These are described in the section “Use of Supporting Text and Documents.”

Principle 1: Strive for comprehensiveness

Comprehensiveness increases transparency, can improve rigor, and allows for a better understanding of alternative explanations to the conclusions drawn, particularly in the presence of null findings for an experimental design. Thus, all relevant determinants, implementation strategies, and outcomes should be included in the IRLM.

Concerning determinants, the valence should be noted as being either a barrier, a facilitator, neutral, or variable by study unit. This can be achieved by simply adding plus (+) or minus (–) signs for facilitators and barriers, respectively, or by using coding systems such as that developed by Damschroder et al. [ 39 ], which indicates the relative strength of the determinant on a scale: – 2 ( strong negative impact ), – 1 ( weak negative impact ), 0 ( neutral or mixed influence ), 1 ( weak positive impact ), and 2 ( strong positive impact ). The use of such a coding system could yield better specification compared to using study-specific adjectives or changing the name of the determinant (e.g., greater relative priority, addresses patient needs, good climate for implementation). It is critical to include all relevant determinants and not simply limit reporting to those that are hypothesized to be related to the strategies and outcomes, as there are complex interrelationships between determinants.

Implementation strategies should be reported in their entirety. When using the IRLM for planning a study, it is important to list all strategies in the system, including those already in use and those to be initiated for the purposes of the study, often in the experimental condition of the design. Second, strategies should be labeled to indicate whether they were (a) in place in the system prior to the study, (b) initiated prospectively for the purposes of the study (particularly for experimental study designs), (c) removed as a result of being ineffective or onerous, or (d) introduced during the study to address an emergent barrier or supplement other strategies because of low initial impact. This is relevant when using the IRLM for planning, as an ongoing tracking system, for retrospective application to a completed study, and in the final reporting of a study. There have been a number of processes proposed for tracking the use of and adaptations to implementation strategies over time [ 40 , 41 ]. Each of these is more detailed than would be necessary for the IRLM, but the processes described provide a method for accurately tracking the temporal aspects of strategy use that fulfill the comprehensiveness principle.

Although most studies will indicate a primary implementation outcome, other outcomes are almost assuredly to be measured. Thus, they ought to be included in the IRLM. This guidance is given in large part due to the interdependence of implementation outcomes, such that adoption relates to delivery with fidelity, reach of the intervention, and potential for sustainment [ 36 ]. Similarly, the overall public health impact (defined as reach multiplied by the effect size of the intervention [ 38 ]) is inextricably tied to adoption, fidelity, acceptability, cost, etc. Although the study might justifiably focus on only one or two implementation outcomes, the others are nonetheless relevant and should be specified and reported. For example, it is important to capture potential unintended consequences and indicators of adverse effects that could result from the implementation of an EBI.

Principle 2: Indicate key conceptual relationships

Although the IRLM has a generalized theory (described earlier), there is a need to indicate the relationships between elements in a manner aligning with the specific theory of change for the study. Researchers ought to provide some form or notation to indicate these conceptual relationships using color-coding, superscripts, arrows, or a combination of the three. Such notations in the IRLM facilitate reference in the text to the study hypotheses, tests of effects, causal chain modeling, and other forms of elaboration (see “Supporting Text and Resources”). We prefer the use of superscripts to color or arrows in grant proposals and articles for practical purposes, as colors can be difficult to distinguish, and arrows can obscure text and contribute to visual convolution. When presenting the IRLM using presentation programs (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote), colors and arrows can be helpful, and animations can make these connections dynamic and sequential without adding to visual complexity. This principle could also prove useful in synthesizing across similar studies to build the science of tailored implementation, where strategies are selected based on the presence of specific combinations of determinants. As previously indicated [ 29 ], there is much work to be done in this area given.

Principle 3: Specify critical study design elements

This critical element will vary by the study design (e.g., hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial, observational, what subsystems are assigned to the strategies). This principle includes not only researchers but service systems and communities, whose consent is necessary to carry out any implementation design [ 3 , 42 , 43 ].

Primary outcome(s)

Indicate the primary outcome(s) at each level of the study design (i.e., clinician, clinic, organization, county, state, nation). The levels should align with the specific aims of a grant application or the stated objective of a research report. In the case of a process evaluation or an observational study including the RE-AIM evaluation components [ 38 ] or the Proctor et al. [ 21 ] taxonomy of implementation outcomes, the primary outcome may be the product of the conceptual or theoretical model used when a priori outcomes are not clearly indicated. We also suggest including downstream health services and clinical outcomes even if they are not measured, as these are important for understanding the logic of the study and the ultimate health-related targets.

For quasi/experimental designs

When quasi/experimental designs [ 3 , 4 ] are used, the independent variable(s) (i.e., the strategies that are introduced or manipulated or that otherwise differentiate study conditions) should be clearly labeled. This is important for internal validity and for differentiating conditions in multi-arm studies.

For comparative implementation trials

In the context of comparative implementation trials [ 3 , 4 ], a study of two or more competing implementation strategies are introduced for the purposes of the study (i.e., the comparison is not implementation-as-usual), and there is a need to indicate the determinants, strategies, mechanisms, and potentially outcomes that differentiate the arms (see Additional File A 2 ). As comparative implementation can involve multiple service delivery systems, the determinants, mechanisms, and outcomes might also differ, though there must be at least one comparable implementation outcome. In our preliminary work applying the IRLM to a large-scale comparative implementation trial, we found that we needed to use an IRLM for each arm of the trial as it was not possible to use a single IRLM because the strategies being tested occurred across two delivery systems and strategies were very different, by design. This is an example of the flexible use of the IRLM.

For implementation optimization designs

A number of designs are now available that aim to test processes of optimizing implementation. These include factorial, Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) [ 44 ], adaptive [ 45 ], and roll-out implementation optimization designs [ 46 ]. These designs allow for (a) building time-varying adaptive implementation strategies based on the order in which components are presented [ 44 ], (b) evaluating the additive and combined effects of multiple strategies [ 44 , 47 ], and (c) can incorporate data-driven iterative changes to improve implementation in successive units [ 45 , 46 ]. The IRLM in Additional File A 4 can be used for such designs.

Additional specification options

Users of the IRLM are allowed to specify any number of additional elements that may be important to their study. For example, one could notate those elements of the IRLM that have been or will be measured versus those that were based on the researcher’s prior studies or inferred from findings reported in the literature. Users can also indicate when implementation strategies differ by level or unit within the study. In large multisite studies, strategies might not be uniform across all units, particularly those strategies that already exist within the system. Similarly, there might be a need to increase the dose of certain strategies to address the relative strengths of different determinants within units.

Using the IRLM for different purposes and stages of research

Commensurate with logic models more generally, the IRLM can be used for planning and organizing a project, carrying out a project (as a roadmap), reporting and presenting the findings of a completed project, and synthesizing the findings of multiple projects or of a specific area of implementation research, such as what is known about how learning collaboratives are effective within clinical care settings.

When the IRLM is used for planning, the process of populating each of the elements often begins with the known parameter(s) of the study. For example, if the problem is improving the adoption and reach of a specific EBI within a particular clinical setting, the implementation outcomes and context, as well as the EBI, are clearly known. The downstream clinical outcomes of the EBI are likely also known. Working from the two “bookends” of the IRLM, the researchers and community partners and/or organization stakeholders can begin to fill in the implementation strategies that are likely to be feasible and effective and then posit conceptually derived mechanisms of action. In another example, only the EBI and primary clinical outcomes were known. The IRLM was useful in considering different scenarios for what strategies might be needed and appropriate to test the implementation of the EBI in different service delivery contexts. The IRLM was a tool for the researchers and stakeholders to work through these multiple options.

When we used the IRLM to plan for the execution of funded implementation studies, the majority of the parameters were already proposed in the grant application. However, through completing the IRLM prior to the start of the study, we found that a number of important contextual factors had not been considered, additional implementation strategies were needed to complement the primary ones proposed in the grant, and mechanisms needed to be added and measured. At the time of award, mechanisms were not an expected component of implementation research projects as they will likely become in the future.

For another project, the IRLM was applied retrospectively to report on the findings and overall logic of the study. Because nearly all elements of the IRLM were known, we approached completion of the model as a means of showing what happened during the study and to accurately report the hypothesized relationships that we observed. These relationships could be formally tested using causal pathway modeling [ 12 ] or other path analysis approaches with one or more intervening variables [ 48 ].

Synthesizing

In our preliminary work with the IRLM, we used it in each of the first three ways; the fourth (synthesizing) is ongoing within the National Cancer Institute’s Improving the Management of symPtoms during And Following Cancer Treatment (IMPACT) research consortium. The purpose is to draw conclusions for the implementation of an EBI in a particular context (or across contexts) that are shared and generalizable to provide a guide for future research and implementation.

Use of supporting text and documents

While the IRLM provides a good deal of information about a project in a single visual, researchers will need to convey additional details about an implementation research study through the use of supporting text, tables, and figures in grant applications, reports, and articles. Some elements that require elaboration are (a) preliminary data on the assessment and valence of implementation determinants; (b) operationalization/detailing of the implementation strategies being used or observed, using established reporting guidelines [ 9 ] and labeling conventions [ 32 ] from the literature; (c) hypothesized or tested causal pathways [ 12 ]; (d) process, service, and clinical outcome measures, including the psychometric properties, method, and timing of administration, respondents, etc.; (e) study procedures, including subject selection, assignment to (or observation of natural) study conditions, and assessment throughout the conduct of the study [ 4 ]; and (f) the implementation plan or process for following established implementation frameworks [ 49 , 50 , 51 ]. By utilizing superscripts, subscripts, and other notations within the IRLM, as previously suggested, it is easy to refer to (a) hypothesized causal paths in theoretical overviews and analytic plan sections, (b) planned measures for determinants and outcomes, and (c) specific implementation strategies in text, tables, and figures.

Evidence of IRLM utility and acceptability

The IRLM was used as the foundation for a training in implementation research methods to a group of 65 planning projects awarded under the national Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative. One investigator (project director or co-investigator) and one implementation partner (i.e., a collaborator from a community service delivery system) from each project were invited to attend a 2-day in-person summit in Chicago, IL, in October 2019. One hundred thirty-two participants attended, representing 63 of the 65 projects. A survey, which included demographics and questions pertaining to the Ending the HIV Epidemic, was sent to potential attendees prior to the summit, to which 129 individuals—including all 65 project directors, 13 co-investigators, and 51 implementation partners (62% Female)—responded. Those who indicated an investigator role ( n = 78) received additional questions about prior implementation research training (e.g., formal coursework, workshop, self-taught) and related experiences (e.g., involvement in a funded implementation project, program implementation, program evaluation, quality improvement) and the stage of their project (i.e., exploration, preparation, implementation, sustainment [ 50 ]).

Approximately 6 weeks after the summit, 89 attendees (69%) completed a post-training survey comprising more than 40 questions about their overall experience. Though the invitation to complete the survey made no mention of the IRLM, it included 10 items related to the IRLM and one more generally about the logic of implementation research, each rated on a 4-point scale (1 = not at all , 2 = a little , 3 = moderately , 4 = very much ; see Table 1 ). Forty-two investigators (65% of projects) and 24 implementation partners indicated attending the training and began and completed the survey (68.2% female). Of the 66 respondents who attended the training, 100% completed all 11 IRLM items, suggesting little potential response bias.

Table 1 provides the means, standard deviations, and percent of respondents endorsing either “moderately” or “very” response options. Results were promising for the utility of the IRLM on the majority of the dimensions assessed. More than 50% of respondents indicated that the IRLM was “moderately” or “very” helpful on all questions. Overall, 77.6% ( M = 3.18, SD = .827) of respondents indicated that their knowledge on the logic of implementation research had increased either moderately or very much after the 2-day training. At the time of the survey, when respondents were about 2.5 months into their 1-year planning projects, 44.6% indicated that they had already been able to complete a full draft of the IRLM.

Additional analyses using a one-way analysis of variance indicated no statistically significant differences in responses to the IRLM questions between investigators and implementation partners. However, three items approached significance: planning the project ( F = 2.460, p = .055), clearly reporting and specifying how the project is to be conducted ( F = 2.327, p = .066), and knowledge on the logic of implementation research ( F = 2.107, p = .091). In each case, scores were higher for the investigators compared to the implementation partners, suggesting that perhaps the knowledge gap in implementation research lay more in the academic realm than among community partners, who may not have a focus on research but whose day-to-day roles include the implementation of EBPs in the real world. Lastly, analyses using ordinal logistic regression did not yield any significant relationship between responses to the IRLM survey items and prior training ( n = 42 investigators who attended the training and completed the post-training survey), prior related research experience ( n = 42), and project stage of implementation ( n = 66). This suggests that the IRLM is a useful tool for both investigators and implementers with varying levels of prior exposure to implementation research concepts and across all stages of implementation research. As a result of this training, the IRLM is now a required element in the FY2020 Ending the HIV Epidemic Centers for AIDS Research/AIDS Research Centers Supplement Announcement released March 2020 [ 15 ].

Resources for using the IRLM

As the use of the IRLM for different study designs and purposes continues to expand and evolve, we envision supporting researchers and other program implementers in applying the IRLM to their own contexts. Our team at Northwestern University hosts web resources on the IRLM that includes completed examples and tools to assist users in completing their model, including templates in various formats (Figs. 1 and 2 , Additional Files A 1 , A 2 , A 3 and A 4 and others) a Quick Reference Guide (Additional File A 8 ) and a series of worksheets that provide guidance on populating the IRLM (Additional File A 9 ). These will be available at https://cepim.northwestern.edu/implementationresearchlogicmodel/ .

The IRLM provides a compact visual depiction of an implementation project and is a useful tool for academic–practice collaboration and partnership development. Used in conjunction with supporting text, tables, and figures to detail each of the primary elements, the IRLM has the potential to improve a number of aspects of implementation research as identified in the results of the post-training survey. The usability of the IRLM is high for seasoned and novice implementation researchers alike, as evidenced by our survey results and preliminary work. Its use in the planning, executing, reporting, and synthesizing of implementation research could increase the rigor and transparency of complex studies that ultimately could improve reproducibility—a challenge in the field—by offering a common structure to increase consistency and a method for more clearly specifying links and pathways to test theories.

Implementation occurs across the gamut of contexts and settings. The IRLM can be used when large organizational change is being considered, such as a new strategic plan with multifaceted strategies and outcomes. Within a narrower scope of a single EBI in a specific setting, the larger organizational context still ought to be included as inner setting determinants (i.e., the impact of the organizational initiative on the specific EBI implementation project) and as implementation strategies (i.e., the specific actions being done to make the organizational change a reality that could be leveraged to implement the EBI or could affect the success of implementation). The IRLM has been used by our team to plan for large systemic changes and to initiate capacity building strategies to address readiness to change (structures, processes, individuals) through strategic planning and leadership engagement at multiple levels in the organization. This aspect of the IRLM continues to evolve.

Among the drawbacks of the IRLM is that it might be viewed as a somewhat simplified format. This represents the challenges of balancing depth and detail with parsimony, ease of comprehension, and ease of use. The structure of the IRLM may inhibit creative thinking if applied too rigidly, which is among the reasons we provide numerous examples of different ways to tailor the model to the specific needs of different project designs and parameters. Relatedly, we encourage users to iterate on the design of the IRLM to increase its utility.

The promise of implementation science lies in the ability to conduct rigorous and reproducible research, to clearly understand the findings, and to synthesize findings from which generalizable conclusions can be drawn and actionable recommendations for practice change emerge. As scientists and implementers have worked to better define the core methods of the field, the need for theory-driven, testable integration of the foundational elements involved in impactful implementation research has become more apparent. The IRLM is a tool that can aid the field in addressing this need and moving toward the ultimate promise of implementation research to improve the provision and quality of healthcare services for all people.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research

Evidence-based intervention

Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change

Implementation Research Logic Model

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank our colleagues who provided input at different stages of developing this article and the Implementation Research Logic Model, and for providing the examples included in this article: Hendricks Brown, Brian Mustanski, Kathryn Macapagal, Nanette Benbow, Lisa Hirschhorn, Richard Lieber, Piper Hansen, Leslie O’Donnell, Allen Heinemann, Enola Proctor, Courtney Wolk-Benjamin, Sandra Naoom, Emily Fu, Jeffrey Rado, Lisa Rosenthal, Patrick Sullivan, Aaron Siegler, Cady Berkel, Carrie Dooyema, Lauren Fiechtner, Jeanne Lindros, Vinny Biggs, Gerri Cannon-Smith, Jeremiah Salmon, Sujata Ghosh, Alison Baker, Jillian MacDonald, Hector Torres and the Center on Halsted in Chicago, Michelle Smith, Thomas Dobbs, and the pastors who work tirelessly to serve their communities in Mississippi and Arkansas.

This study was supported by grant P30 DA027828 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, awarded to C. Hendricks Brown; grant U18 DP006255 to Justin Smith and Cady Berkel; grant R56 HL148192 to Justin Smith; grant UL1 TR001422 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to Donald Lloyd-Jones; grant R01 MH118213 to Brian Mustanski; grant P30 AI117943 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to Richard D’Aquila; grant UM1 CA233035 from the National Cancer Institute to David Cella; a grant from the Woman’s Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital to John Csernansky; grant F32 HS025077 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; grant NIFTI 2016-20178 from the Foundation for Physical Therapy; the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab; and by the Implementation Research Institute (IRI) at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis, through grant R25 MH080916 from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs, Health Services Research & Development Service, and Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) to Enola Proctor. The opinions expressed herein are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality the Department of Veterans Affairs, or any other part of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

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Justin D. Smith

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JDS conceived of the Implementation Research Logic Model. JDS, MR, and DL collaborated in developing the Implementation Research Logic Model as presented and in the writing of the manuscript. All authors approved of the final version.

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Not applicable. This study did not involve human subjects.

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Supplementary information

Additional file 1..

IRLM Fillable PDF form

Additional file 2.

IRLM for Comparative Implementation

Additional file 3.

IRLM for Implementation of an Intervention Across or Linking Two Contexts

Additional file 4.

IRLM for an Implementation Optimization Study

Additional file 5.

IRLM example 1: Faith in Action: Clergy and Community Health Center Communication Strategies for Ending the Epidemic in Mississippi and Arkansas

Additional file 6.

IRLM example 2: Hybrid Type II Effectiveness–Implementation Evaluation of a City-Wide HIV System Navigation Intervention in Chicago, IL

Additional file 7.

IRLM example 3: Implementation, spread, and sustainment of Physical Therapy for Mild Parkinson’s Disease through a Regional System of Care

Additional file 8.

IRLM Quick Reference Guide

Additional file 9.

IRLM Worksheets

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Smith, J.D., Li, D.H. & Rafferty, M.R. The Implementation Research Logic Model: a method for planning, executing, reporting, and synthesizing implementation projects. Implementation Sci 15 , 84 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-020-01041-8

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What is an implementation plan? 6 steps to create one

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An implementation plan—also known as a strategic plan—outlines the steps your team should take when accomplishing a shared goal or objective. This plan combines strategy, process, and action and will include all parts of the project from scope to budget and beyond. In this guide, we’ll discuss what an implementation plan is and how to create one.

Projects require planning to be successful. Would you build a house without a blueprint? Probably not, because nailing pieces of wood together without a plan could lead to disaster. The same concept is true in the corporate world. An implementation plan functions as the blueprint for any shared objective. Your plan should include everything from the project strategy, to the budget, to the list of people working on the project. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss what an implementation plan is and how to create one. These steps can help you and your team prepare for projects both big and small.

What is the purpose of an implementation plan?

The purpose of an implementation plan is to ensure that your team can answer the who, what, when, how, and why of a project before moving into the execution phase. In simple terms, it's the action plan that turns your strategy into specific tasks.

What is an implementation plan?

A good way to know whether your implementation plan is effective is to hand it to someone outside of your team and see if they can understand the project in its entirety. Your implementation plan should leave no questions unanswered.

How to create an implementation plan in 6 steps

If you want your implementation plan to be comprehensive and beneficial to your project team, you’ll need to follow specific steps and include the right components. Use the following steps when creating your plan to reduce the risk of gaps in your strategy.

How to develop an implementation plan

1. Define goals

The first step in the implementation process is defining your goals . Determine what you hope to accomplish when your project is complete, like whether you hope to win over a new marketing client or revamp your internal content strategy. Starting with your project objectives in mind can help flesh out your project plan. 

Tips to consider:

Ask questions: When defining your goals, you and your team may want to ask questions about your project such as, “What are we trying to achieve with this project? What deliverables do we hope to produce? Who are the stakeholders we plan to share our project deliverables with?”

Brainstorm risk scenarios: Although you’ll perform a more in-depth risk assessment later on in your implementation plan, brainstorming potential risk scenarios early on gives you a more realistic idea of what you’re able to achieve. 

2. Conduct research

Once you have a broad idea of the project goals you want to achieve, you can hone in on these goals by conducting research such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, or observations. Your research should come from key experts in your field. These experts may be team members or external stakeholders. Your research outcomes should include a list of what your project timeline, budget, and personnel may look like.

Collaborate using shared tools: Collaboration is easier when you have the right communication tools in place to do so. Use a team collaboration tool to share your project goals and get feedback from others, regardless of their location. 

3. Map out risks

You brainstormed risk scenarios in step one of your implementation strategy, and in step three, you’ll map out all the potential risks you may face in your project. Risks can include anything from paid time off and holidays to budget constraints and loss of personnel. 

A great way to map out your risks is by using a risk register. This tool will help you prioritize project risks and prepare for them accordingly. You can also conduct a SWOT analysis , which will identify any weaknesses or threats affecting your project. 

Be flexible and proactive: Mapping out risks is more than just a preparation strategy. If you identify preventable risks during this stage of the implementation plan, you can take action to prevent those risks. This may mean adjusting your initial project goals. 

4. Schedule milestones

Scheduling your project milestones is an important step in the planning process because these checkpoints help you track your progress during execution. Milestones serve as metrics—they are a way to measure how far you’ve come in your project and how far you have left to go. 

To visualize project milestones and keep your entire team on track, use a Gantt chart . With a Gantt chart, you can visually lay out your implementation schedule and show how long you think each task will take.

Add wiggle room: Things don’t always go as planned, even if you do everything in your power to a schedule. By adding wiggle room to your schedule, you can ensure your project stays on track instead of keeping tight milestones and failing to meet them.

Clarify dependencies: Dependencies are tasks that rely on the completion of other tasks. Clarifying your dependencies makes it easier to keep the project on track and hit your milestones.

5. Assign responsibilities and tasks

Every action plan must include a list of responsibilities with team members assigned to each one. By assigning responsibilities, you can assess the performance of each team member and monitor progress more closely. Using a RACI chart can be an effective project management tool for clarifying roles and responsibilities. 

Assigning responsibilities is different from assigning individual tasks. One team member may be responsible for overseeing the project review, while you may assign three other team members to handle the delivery and communication of the project to various teams for review. When you assign responsibilities and tasks, be sure to make your expectations clear. 

Communication is key: When you assign roles, responsibilities, or tasks, it’s best to communicate why you’re choosing one team member over another. Instead of letting team members question why they have specific roles, you can use this step in the planning process as an opportunity to highlight team member strengths.

Track responsibilities in a shared tool: Having a shared tool, like project management software, can give team members clarity on who's doing what and by when.

6. Allocate resources

Resource allocation is one of the best ways to reduce risk. If you can plan out what resources you need for your project and ensure those resources will be available, you’ll avoid the risk of running out of resources mid-project. If you notice that you don’t have enough resources in this step of the implementation process, you can adjust your project accordingly before it kicks off. 

Resources may include money, personnel, software, equipment, and other physical or technical materials. Time can also be a resource because the team members you need to complete the project may be working on other projects.

Tips to consider: Ask yourself the following questions when identifying available resources for your project: 

What is the project’s priority level? 

Who is available to work on this project? 

What budget or tools are available? 

What additional resources do we need? 

Who needs to approve the resource allocation plan?

Following these steps as you create your implementation plan will increase the likelihood of hitting your project goals. Having a checklist of the items to include in your implementation plan can also lead to successful implementation. 

What to include in an implementation plan

Knowing how to create your implementation plan is crucial, but you also need to know what to include in your plan. This checklist includes the six most important items you’ll want to consider if you want to move forward with a successful project. 

Implementation plan checklist

1. Objectives

You’ll outline your project objectives in step one of the implementation process. Set your goals and decide what metrics your team will use to measure to monitor progress. By clearly identifying your project objectives, you and your team can measure progress and performance as you move forward.

2. Scope statement

You’ll set the scope of your project in step two when conducting research. Your project scope statement should outline the boundaries you’ve set for your project and broadly define what goals, deadlines, and project outcomes you’ll be working toward. Defining your project scope in the implementation plan can help prevent scope creep when you’re farther along in the project.

3. Outline of deliverables

Deliverables are the tangible goals of your project. Outlining the deliverables you hope to create can serve as a resource when managing time frames, delegating tasks, and allocating resources. 

4. Task due dates

Although the project timeline may change as your project progresses, it’s important to clarify your expected due dates during implementation planning. When you estimate task due dates, you can schedule milestones around these due dates and plan for project completion. You will commonly see Gantt charts used for strategic planning and implementation planning. This is because Gantt charts display information in a follows a linear path, similar to a timeline. 

5. Risk assessment

You’ll conduct your risk assessment in step three of the implementation process. Whether you use a   risk register , SWOT analysis , or contingency plan to identify risks , be sure to include these documents in your plan. That way, others involved in the project can look through your findings and potentially help you prevent these risks. 

6. Team member roles and responsibilities

You assigned roles and responsibilities to team members in step five of your plan, and keeping a detailed record of what these are can hold everyone accountable. Whether you use a RACI chart or another tool to clarify team member roles, there should be a place in your plan for everyone to refer to in case questions arise. 

Your implementation plan will likely be unique to the project you're working on, so it may include other components not listed above. However, you can use the six items above as your guide so you know your plan is comprehensive.

Many aspects of project implementation overlap with strategic planning. As a project manager , working on the project implementation plan while you are also working on the strategic plan can help minimize the total time spent on planning.

Another way to save time during the planning process is to house all of your plans in a work management platform. When your project team is ready to start the implementation process, everything is in one convenient place.

Benefits of having an implementation plan

There are many benefits to implementation planning, with the top benefit being an increased chance of project success. Implementing a project plan creates a roadmap for executing your project so you can prevent issues from occurring. 

Other benefits to having an implementation plan include:

Improved communication between team members and key stakeholders

Better organization and management of resources

Increased accountability for everyone involved in the project

More structured project timeline and daily workflow

Easier collaboration between team members

Going straight into the execution phase without an implementation plan may feel like walking on stage to give a speech without knowing what you’re going to say. Preparation is key for top-notch performance. 

Simplify implementation planning

Knowing the steps for implementation planning is the foundation of project management. A well-planned project leads to a successful project.

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1. brainstorm for the specific outcomes of research, 2. assign implementation responsibilities to individuals, 3. conduct a risk assessment for the plan, 4. develop a comprehensive budget plan, 5. establish and delegate tasks for the implementation plan, 6. create a schedule for the implementation plan.

  • Have a clear set of goals and objectives
  • Determine roles and responsibilities
  • Delegate work
  • Execute the plan and monitor its progress
  • Take corrective action as necessary
  • Acquire project closure
  • Develop feedback on the implementation process

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The Ultimate Guide to Implementation Plans

May 4, 2022 - 10 min read

Maria Waida

Implementation plans provide step-by-step instructions for everything from digital marketing campaigns to ending hunger in rural communities . They’re used to transform abstract concepts within strategy plans into real-world action. The only downside is that implementation plans can be challenging to pull off. Some industries see as much as a 75% failure rate in plan execution. 

The good news is you can succeed where others have failed by creating a successful implementation plan with the tips and strategies outlined in this guide. 

Keep reading to discover must-have components for implementation plans, a thorough step-by-step planning method, and advice on how to avoid common pitfalls. 

What is an implementation plan?

A project implementation plan (also called a strategic plan) is a combination of strategy, process, and action. It outlines the steps a team will use to achieve a shared objective. An implementation plan covers all aspects of a project , including the budget, timeline, and personnel.

The perfect project plan includes: 

  • Objectives, requirements
  • Scope assessment
  • An outline of deliverables
  • Task due dates
  • Risk assessment
  • Stakeholder, team, and process management plans
  • Team member roles and responsibilities
  • Resource management
  • Communication tools

Roadmap planning breaks down big-picture goals into measurable project phases, tasks, and subtasks. Each category is clearly defined with its own deadlines and resource allocations. Tasks and subtasks are assigned to team members who will complete and approve each one. 

In other words, if the goal is the "what," the implementation plan is the "how."  

An implementation plan is often presented as a written document or planned in a project management solution . The latter is a better fit for this particular roadmap because, as you can probably tell, implementation plans are complex and comprehensive. Implementation plans should all contain solutions for:

  • Tasks and subtasks
  • Timelines 
  • Collaborators
  • Any additional resources

It’s also important to note that having a flexible implementation plan is key for dealing with changes that come up once the project is live. 

What are the benefits of implementation planning?

The benefits of implementation planning range from organizational to relationship-building to increased profitability. A solid implementation plan: 

  • Creates an actionable roadmap from project inception to completion
  • Makes communication simple and crystal clear
  • Improves employee retention in the long-term
  • Organizes all resources in one manageable place
  • Helps businesses be proactive instead of reactive
  • Offers transparency to clients and collaborators
  • Builds trust among stakeholders
  • Holds everyone accountable
  • Outlines a daily and weekly workflow the whole team can follow
  • Improves the likelihood of buy-in
  • Makes collaboration more fluid and synergistic
  • Helps businesses commit to long-term goals
  • Gets everyone’s thoughts out of their heads and into one accessible place

When do you begin implementation planning?

Because it’s so involved, it’s important that you don’t begin implementation planning too early or too late. 

Why? The process of creating an implementation plan is time-consuming. Most of the tasks involved require you to wait on communication or approvals from multiple stakeholders. The process also requires lots of research, goal-setting, gathering or defining resources, and getting team availability together. 

Avoid planning too early by waiting until the project is officially greenlit. The definition of greenlit means something different to every agency. However, most would agree that a signed contract and successful deposit payment are good markers. 

After those client onboarding tasks are complete, you can begin implementation planning. Remember, the project can’t begin without these plans, so have a system in place to kick off and support implementation planning ahead of time. 

The Ultimate Guide To Implementation Plans 2

What is an implementation timeline? 

An implementation timeline is a visual representation of all project-related due dates. That includes:

  • The final project due date
  • Dates your team needs to complete each phase by 
  • Due dates for individual tasks and subtasks 

These dates aren’t set in stone yet. However, accurately forecasting effort and mini-milestones now will make the implementation phase that much easier. 

Implementation timelines are often represented by visual Gantt charts . A Gantt chart uses bars to track the progress of each phase, task, and subtask all at once. Wrike users can add task dependencies, which trigger automatic chart updates and notifications to team members in charge of the next steps. 

Gantt charts also help project managers identify possible roadblocks. With every single step laid out, it’s easy to see where resources are stretched too thin and whether or not milestones are realistic. 

How do you make an implementation plan?

Follow these steps to create a successful implementation plan: 

  • Choose an implementation planning tool Project management solutions like Wrike can help teams share information, start and complete approvals, and set up timelines with ease. 
  • Holidays or upcoming PTO
  • Delivery time for goods and materials
  • Additional training or onboarding of outside team members
  • Review the strategic plan Ask yourself, where do the implementation plan and strategic plan align so far? Where does it conflict? When in doubt, always edit your implementation plan to support your strategic plan. 
  • What the project is
  • Why it’s important
  • Who is involved 
  • What is each person’s role in the project 
  • What all parties hope to achieve
  • The obstacles you foresee and how your team will overcome them
  • Which ROIs you’ll use to measure success
  • Is available for the project as a whole 
  • Should be allocated to each key phase
  • Will be monitored, and who will oversee it
  • Will be broken down into trackable categories
  • Collect related materials Gather the documents you need to plan and execute the project all in one place. Include data from past projects that may help you accurately forecast this one. 
  • Define how progress will be measured and monitored Choose KPIs that align with your project goals, then chart progress within your project management solution. Come up with a plan for who is in charge and how often they’ll check in. 
  • Outline management buy-in criteria Get crystal clear on what managers are looking for, what information they need to approve or reject, and any other information that will decrease resistance. 
  • Do a stakeholder analysis Create a chart that defines each stakeholder’s level of impact, influence, and attitude. Explain the evaluations further and create an action plan for each person or group. 
  • Clarify day-to-day operations Include a work plan that goes over which processes will be used, which will be changed, and how future changes will be dealt with down the road. Choose who is responsible for approving, managing, and finalizing adjustments as they come up. 
  • Everyone’s preferred mode of communication
  • What type of updates are expected when 
  • And how information will be shared  Also, designate communication channels and leaders who will oversee them.  Don’t forget to loop in both your implementation leader and strategy director. Stakeholders do not need to sign off on this section. However, you may choose to share it with them so they can see how you plan to keep everyone on track. 
  • Identify key project phases, tasks, and subtasks Break the project goal down into actionable steps. Give each phase a name, deadline, and set of related tasks. Use project status updates in Wrike to communicate task and subtask due date expectations with everyone involved. Updates are formatted as dropdown menu options which make it easy for individuals to quickly update the entire team when they’ve moved on to the next step.  After, assign team members to complete and approve each task. Set up task dependencies within Wrike, so status notifications are automatically sent to those who were waiting to move on to the next step. 
  • Go over security needs If your project deals with sensitive data, outline what you’ll need to keep the entire project and team compliant throughout. List all digital and physical information sources that require privacy (think sensitive company financial data, home addresses, credit or bank account information, etc.). 
  • Provide a glossary Include industry terms that clients, stakeholders, and teams will need to know throughout the course of the project. Add project-related abbreviations, slang, or resource nicknames you expect will come up in communications. 

What are the components of an implementation plan?

There are 13 components every implementation plan needs to have:

  • Selected tools
  • Preliminary research
  • Strategic plan alignment
  • Project summary
  • Resource and materials list
  • Goal monitoring and measurement
  • Buy-in criteria
  • Stakeholder management
  • Operations plan
  • Management plan
  • Key phases and tasks
  • Glossary of terms

A simple implementation plan template

Your own project implementation plan will have lots of information included, but a simple table including the steps needed to launch the project is always a good place to start.

In this example, a small business is preparing to launch an online store to sell its products. Let's take a look at how this looks on a simple table. 

What are implementation planning best practices?

  • Always be as specific as possible 
  • Don’t shy away from consulting experts and conducting additional research as needed 
  • Pull data from similar past projects (successful and unsuccessful), then apply what you learned 
  • Remember that 100% alignment between all stakeholders and personnel across the board is unrealistic 
  • Use a project management solution to quickly update plans when changes come up 
  • Centralize communication to save time and keep everyone on the same page 

What information do you put in an implementation schedule?

Include an outline of the project timeline, goals, and tasks to keep teams on the same page. Combine that with key updates on:

  • The progress of major phases
  • Adjustments made to budgets, timelines, or personnel
  • Upcoming challenges and planned solutions

Implementation schedules are also meant for stakeholders, so the information you put in one needs to be tailored toward their needs. Identify each stakeholder’s level of involvement and what information they want to receive. 

What is the implementation process?

The implementation process is the step-by-step plan a team follows to achieve a shared objective. Each step is concrete and actionable. These instructions should be easily understood by anyone who reads them. 

What is a good implementation plan example? 

One good implementation plan example comes from Outdoor Equipment Manufacturer MTD . The brand uses Wrike to optimize its complex product development process. 

Their projects involve having multiple active tasks open across a variety of teams at the same time. As a result, their implementation plan relies on custom workflows, visual progress updates, and a bird’s eye view of what’s going on across the entire organization. 

Who creates implementation plans?

Project managers create implementation plans. They may choose to collaborate with team leads, subject experts, suppliers, and stakeholders to add important details. However, project managers are responsible for drafting, revising, and monitoring implementation plans the whole way through. 

What are the challenges of an implementation plan?

  • Foggy vision Implementation plans are only as good as the strategy they’re based on. Connect back to your original goals and strategy plan frequently when drafting the implementation process. 
  • Bad communication Instant messenger notes and email updates tend to get lost over the course of a project. Centralize all communication in your project management platform. In Wrike, use @ mentions to loop in stakeholders and collaborators. 
  • Lack of training Hire outside specialists or plan time for proper employee training on new projects, especially if those skill sets come with a learning curve. 

How to use Wrike as implementation planning software

Create a foolproof project plan using Wrike’s visual Gantt charts, detailed task options, and robust templates . Each of these features helps project managers easily make and monitor progress. Use our two-week free trial to save time with customizable implementation plan templates you can use over and over again.

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Maria Waida

Maria is a freelance content writer who specializes in blogging and other marketing materials for enterprise software businesses.

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Top 7 Project Implementation Plan Templates for Smooth Execution!

Top 7 Project Implementation Plan Templates for Smooth Execution!

Naveen Kumar

author-user

Kidlin’s law, one of the top five unavoidable philosophies of life, says, “If you can write down the problem clearly, then the issue is half solved.” In project management, this law is meant to be followed literally, as imagine resolving half of your worrying headaches by just writing the issues down! 

Excellent project managers, however, fight the battle thrice. First, in their mind or visualization, easy but ever-going throughout the project. Then on paper or planning, that makes the difference between the success and failure of a project. And finally, when it comes to the execution of the project itself.

The result of the second battle is a project implementation plan, an important document you shouldn’t miss studying before starting the next project.

How Important a Project Implementation Plan Is

A project implementation plan is a comprehensive document that outlines steps, processes, and resources needed to bring a project to life. It serves as a roadmap that guides participants toward achieving their goals and objectives. A well-defined project implementation plan increases the chances of project completion within time and budget by over 350% (2.5 times) than those without one. 

Research has shown that 7 of ten projects fail due to poor planning and execution. In fact, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI), organizations waste an average of $97 million for every $1 billion invested in projects. This is because only five of ten organizations have a standardized approach to project management . As you will have guessed by now, better project management starts with a well-crafted project implementation plan.

Project Implementation Plan Templates

Writing a clear and comprehensive implementation plan is a small leap to cover the bridge between project planning and execution. Writing the project implementation plan is nothing less than a small project in itself, especially for complex and lengthy projects. 

Visualizing everything from beginning to end, writing down every detail from the action plan to best practices and resources to budget, indeed, will be overwhelming. Also, you have to ensure you cover every small sub-project as well. That’s where our pre-designed project implementation plan templates come to the rescue. 

Our PPT Slides give you a head start in writing down the implementation plan with research-based elements already part of the plan. The 100% customizable nature of these templates provides you with the desired flexibility to edit your implementation plans and present them afresh every time. The content-ready slides give you the much-needed structure to create a go-to and easy-to-follow project implementation plan.

1. Project Planning Implementation Process Presentation Deck 

This presentation deck has 12 high-quality templates that will help you devise a clear implementation process and make your projects successful. It contains PPT Slides on the website design project implementation plan, three-stage models for the BIS project, strategic implementation flowchart , operating project implementation stage gate process, and more. Download it now!

Project Planning Implementation Process Presentation Deck

Download this template

2. Project Implementation Plan Roadmap Presentation Template

Use this PPT Design to devise a detailed project implementation plan highlighting the details of different phases or activities in a roadmap style. It helps users record project planning, development, supporting stages, and key milestones. You will find space to write important dates or make a time scale at the top of this PowerPoint set. Get it now!

Project Implementation Plan Roadmap Presentation Template

3. Product Project Implementation Plan And Timeline PPT Template

This presentation design will be your blueprint for creating and presenting an all-inclusive presentation plan that will keep your team aligned and focused. It divides the product development project into three major stages — planning, development, and marketing. You will be able to mark monthly milestones and critical activities as well as track progress with the help of this research-based PowerPoint Slide. Download it now!

Product Project Implementation Plan And Timeline PPT Template

4. Project Implementation Plan Presentation Template

Take advantage of this PowerPoint set to run your next project smoothly with a comprehensive implementation plan. It contains pre-designed sections to write phase names, activity details, start & end dates, and the number of days for each activity completion. You can also use the blank calendar to write critical information or mark the status of activities like complete, ongoing, or on-hold. Grab it today!

Project Implementation Plan Presentation Template

5. Project Implementation Plan Gantt Chart Presentation Template

Want to make your next business project a cakewalk? Then this PPT Design is an ideal choice for you. It will help you monitor the daily progress of multiple projects and their implementation plans. You can edit this PowerPoint Slide to its core components like text, color, theme, layout, etc., to meet your project requirements or branding. Download it now!

Project Implementation Plan Gantt Chart Presentation Template

6. Project Planning Implementation Timeline PPT Template

With this user-friendly presentation design, you will be able to create an easy-to-read implementation plan. It allows you to strategize the four-month project activities in a weekly manner. You can add the activity’s name in the pre-designed section and mark their status with green ticks or red crosses in the calendar. Get it now!

Project Planning Implementation Timeline PPT Template

7. Project Implementation Plan Process Presentation Template

A detailed implementation plan helps you stay ahead and manage projects hassle-free without making rushed decisions in real-time. This PPT Slide shows the stages of an implementation plan to help you make a comprehensive one for your next big project. It starts with commencing a project and proceeds further with discovery, design, testing, training, deployment, and ends with support. Grab it today!

Project Implementation Plan Process Presentation Template

Let’s Pace It!

A project implementation plan serves as a roadmap that outlines the steps and processes required to execute a project successfully. It keeps the team aligned, increases efficiency, communication , and effective resource use, and saves projects from risks like scope creep.

Our project implementation plan templates will help you design actionable procedures that keep your project execution on track. These PPT Designs will be your next ideal and pocket-friendly resource for project planning . 

Download these project implementation plan templates now and make your project a success story!

FAQs on Project Implementation Plan

1. what are the 4 major components of an implementation plan.

An implementation plan includes the following four major components:

  • Goals and Objectives: This component defines the desired outcomes that the plan is designed to achieve. These goals and objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
  • Action Plan: It outlines actions to achieve goals and objectives and includes timelines, responsibilities, and resources required for each activity.
  • Monitoring and Evaluation: Here, the project manager establishes a process for monitoring the progress of the implementation plan and evaluating its effectiveness. It includes regular progress reports, performance indicators, and feedback mechanisms.
  • Communication Plan: This component outlines the communication strategy for the implementation plan, which includes identifying the target audience, key messages, and communication channels.

2. What are the 4 stages of project implementation?

The four stages of project implementation are:

  • Initiation: This involves defining project objectives, identifying stakeholders, determining feasibility, and creating a project charter that outlines the scope, objectives, and key stakeholders of the project.
  • Planning: Here, the team develops a detailed project plan that outlines activities, timelines, resources, and budget required to complete the project. It also includes risk assessments, contingency plans, and communication strategies.
  • Execution: At this stage project plan rollout into action, its progress is monitored, and necessary adjustments are made. The project team must coordinate activities, manage resources, and communicate regularly with stakeholders to ensure the project delivery is within budget and deadline.
  • Closure: This final stage involves completing the project and transferring deliverables to the clients or management. The project team conducts a final evaluation to assess its success, identify lessons learned, and document best practices. The project is closed out by releasing resources, archiving documentation, and concluding the project.

3. What are the 5 P's models of strategy implementation?

The 5 Ps model of strategy implementation is a framework that outlines five critical elements for successfully implementing a strategic plan. These are:

  • Plan: This refers to the strategic plan itself, including the objectives, goals, and actions required to achieve desired outcomes. A clear and comprehensive plan is essential for guiding the implementation process.
  • People: It is the workforce required to implement the plan. It includes identifying the skills, knowledge, and experience needed for the project team, as well as developing a communication plan to engage and inform stakeholders.
  • Processes: This refers to the systems and processes used to execute the plan, including the workflows, procedures, and protocols.
  • Products: These refer to the goods or services that will be delivered at the completion of the project or plan. It is important to ensure the goals and objectives of the plan are aligned with the desired products and target audience needs.
  • Performance: This refers to the metrics and measures that will be used to evaluate plan success. It includes KPIs and a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess progress and adjust the plan.

4. What are the 4 implementation strategies?

Here are four common implementation strategies:

  • Direct Implementation: In this strategy, an organization implements the plan through its internal resources, such as its employees, equipment, and infrastructure.
  • Pilot Implementation: This strategy involves testing the plan on a small scale before rolling it out on a larger scale. This approach allows the organization to identify issues or challenges before implementing the plan more broadly. It is used for complex or risky projects.
  • Phased Implementation: Here, the plan is implemented in stages or phases. Each phase builds on the previous one, and the organization can assess progress and adjust the plan before moving to the next phase. It is useful for complex projects that require significant resources and time to execute.
  • Outsourced Implementation: In this strategy, the organization outsources the implementation of the plan to a third-party service provider. This approach is helpful for an organization that lacks the necessary resources, expertise, or infrastructure to execute the plan. However, it involves additional costs and requires careful relationship management.

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  • Sample Research

FREE 10+ Research Implementation Plan Samples in PDF | MS Word

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Alan Werner wrote in his book “ A Guide to Implementation Research ” that implementation studies are sometimes contrasted with impact studies in the field of evaluation research. Implementation studies do more than simply describe program experiences but they also assess and explain. What are the things you need to do in writing an implementation plan for your research work? In this article, we have some downloadable plan samples to guide you in your research project. Keep on reading!

Research Implementation Plan

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A research implementation plan is a powerful tool to guide researchers in capturing and analyzing essential information in real time, allowing for the assessment of performance, supporting the scale-up of interventions, and their assimilation into healthcare systems at the national level, supporting the reiterative refinement necessary for successful adaptation. 

Research implementation not only asks, ‘What is happening?” but also “Is it what is expected or desired?” and “Why is it happening as it is?” Below are some helpful tips in writing an effective research implementation plan: 

What are the program or project goals, concept or idea, and design? Are they based on sound theory and practice? There are times that implementation research may be concerned with integral questions of the soundness of program or project concept and design. For instance, do the proposed services suit the needs of the target population and are they likely to contribute to the specific program or project’s goals? 

In order to create the overall research plan , implementation researchers need to observe program or project operations, measure the degree to which they are operating as planned, diagnose issues, and suggest appropriate solutions.

Being gathered firsthand in the field or a certain location where program activities happen, an enormous part of essential information are personal accounts of program processes, experiences, opinions, and outcomes by the program planners and developers, state agency managers, public interest groups, local office management and staff, and other key stakeholders. Open-ended interviews, focus groups, participant observation and others are the common techniques in gathering information.

Then, you can do an assessment by judging whether or not the program or policy understudy is operating based on some model, norm, or standard. Simply, it is about making comparisons of data on program operations, activities, services, and results with some standard and developing a thorough evaluation.  

As you are finalizing your implementation plan , demonstrate your research findings by explaining the summary of what the entire program or project suggested, revealed or indicated. You can use tables, charts, graphs, and other figures in presenting your findings. Include a comprehensive report on data collection, recruitment, and participants involved in the program or project. 

An implementation plan has five important elements: the work plan, resources and budget, stakeholders, risk assessment, and quality control.

The five tasks of implementation planning are specifying partner roles and responsibilities, outlining activities, setting up a timeline, determining a budget, and accomplishing implementation plans .

The stages of implementation are exploration, installation, initial implementation, and full implementation.

The various techniques that are necessary for research planning and implementation are document analysis, observation like doing some ethnographic studies, and case-studies surveys using structured interviews and questionnaires.

Therefore, the core purpose of research implementation is to describe, assess, and explain “what is happening and why” may be exceptionally compelling when brought to bear on the following primary issues of program design, resources, administration, services, and outcomes. To help you in this matter, you can freely use our guides with the tips we provided in this article. Here are some of our downloadable and printable project plan samples available in different kinds of formats. Simply click the templates in this article and start downloading now!

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Free 10+ research implementation plan templates in pdf | ms word, 1. research implementation plan template, 2. research strategy implementation plan template, 3. research implementation plan format, 4. research training implementation plan template, 5. research and strategic plan implementation, 6. scientific research implementation plan template, 7. research implementation plan in pdf, 8. research progress implementation plan template, 9. research training implementation plan format, 10. sample research implementation plan template, 11. research project implementation plan checklist, what is an implementation strategy, what is the strategic implementation process, what are the factors which you might implement in your research plan, why implementation is important, parts of an implementation plan, what is the most effective method to write an implementation plan, plan templates.

To increase comprehension of the execution procedures, we should initially characterize an implementation process. A research implementation is a way toward characterizing the procedure by which you (or a group or association) will achieve certain objectives or decide. Associations make vital arrangements to manage the authoritative course, a specific office’s endeavors, or any venture or activity.

research project implementation plan

Hierarchical Planning

Vital management process, change management, separated planning, characterize goals/objectives, calendar milestones, assign resources, assign team member responsibilities, characterize metrics for success, characterize how you will adapt, assess success, presentation, the executive’s overview, significant tasks, usage schedule, security and privacy, usage support/resources list, documentation, checking performance, acknowledgment criteria, more in plan templates, editable research flowchart template, medical research template, research template, qualitative research template, psychology research template, research conference template, science research template, academic research template, high school research template, research proposal template.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

This article is part of the research topic.

Possible Nature(s) in Urban Spaces: Plurality and Agency to Tackle Socio-Ecological Challenges

Exploring the Nexus of Gender and Environment in the H2020 PHOENIX Project: Insights from the Design of a Gender Equality Plan

  • 1 Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The H2020-funded PHOENIX project (2022-2025) aims to enhance democratic innovations to implement the European Green Deal (EGD) at local, regional, and national levels, focusing on key policy areas like farm-to-fork, circular economy, energy transition, and healthy soil. Despite the European Green Deal's ambitious goals for a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, it primarily emphasizes technological solutions and overlooks social vulnerabilities like gender, class, and race. In the light of the European Commission's efforts to promote gender equality in EU-funded projects through the implementation of Gender Equality Plans (GEPs), the study carried out a comprehensive literature review aimed at gaining insights into the intricate relationship between gender and the environment with a particular focus on the intersection of gender and research and innovation, especially within the context of the European Green Deal. Drawing on their experience as action researchers developing a Gender Equality Plan within the H2020 PHOENIX project, the authors emphasize the importance of gender-sensitive research in environmental projects and underscore the significance of a participatory approach in achieving effective gender change. The lack of reporting on experiences of incorporating a gender perspective has resulted in a significant knowledge gap regarding the various impacts that environmental actions can have on people's lives, based on their gender. The article endeavours to bridge this gap by achieving two main goals: highlighting the importance of gender-sensitive research in environmental projects and discussing how the gender gap is addressed in the H2020 PHOENIX project through its participatory approach to design the Gender Equality Plan.

Keywords: gender, Climate Change, environment, Gender equality plan, European Green Deal

Received: 31 Oct 2023; Accepted: 12 Feb 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Holz, Esteves, Lopes and Sandri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: PhD. Sheila Holz, Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal PhD. Denise Esteves, Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

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  1. Final Research Project

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  1. How to Write a Research Plan: A Step by Step Guide

    Here are some of the benefits of creating a research plan document for every project: Project organization and structure. Well-informed participants. ... Realistically outline the time needed to properly execute each supporting phase of research and implementation. And, as you evaluate the necessary schedules, be sure to include additional time ...

  2. Implementation research: what it is and how to do it

    Implementation research can consider any aspect of implementation, including the factors affecting implementation, the processes of implementation, and the results of implementation, including how to introduce potential solutions into a health system or how to promote their large scale use and sustainability.

  3. PDF Implementation Plan Template and Examples

    The Implementation Plan Template is designed to guide implementation teams in developing a plan for implementation across the four stages: exploration, installation, initial implementation and full implementation.

  4. Implementation plan: What to include and 5 essential steps

    A project plan or project implementation plan is a key strategic document that keeps teams on track throughout a project, indicating how a project is expected to run along with who's responsible for what. It's an extremely valuable planning tool — one that can be the difference between project success and project failure.

  5. What Is an Implementation Plan? (Template & Example Included)

    An implementation plan is a document that describes the necessary steps for the execution of a project. Implementation plans break down the project implementation process by defining the timeline, the teams and the resources that'll be needed. Get your free Implementation Plan Template

  6. Developing an Implementation Research Proposal

    Developing an Implementation Research Proposal This module is designed as an aid to the development of a high quality implementation research (IR) proposal by a research team. It draws extensively and builds upon the content of the proposal development module in the first edition of this toolkit. 1

  7. Designs and methods for implementation research: Advancing the mission

    Results: Examples of specific research designs and methods illustrate their use in implementation science. We propose that the CTSA program takes advantage of the momentum of the field's capacity building in three ways: 1) integrate state-of-the-science implementation methods and designs into its existing body of research; 2) position itself at the forefront of advancing the science of ...

  8. What Is Implementation Planning? And How to Write Your Plan

    An implementation plan is a written document that outlines a team's steps to accomplish a goal or project. Having such a document enables team members and key stakeholders to understand all aspects of a project before executing it.

  9. Strategies for Implementing Implementation Science: A Methodologic

    The journal Implementation Science defines implementation research as " the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of proven clinical treatments, practices, organizational, and management interventions into routine practice, and hence to improve health.

  10. PDF Implementation Research Toolkit

    Specific support was also provided by USAID, and by the Implementation Research Platform, which is based at the World Health Organization and brings together the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research; the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction; the World Health Organization's Department o...

  11. The Implementation Research Logic Model: a method for planning

    Numerous models, frameworks, and theories exist for specific aspects of implementation research, including for determinants, strategies, and outcomes. However, implementation research projects often fail to provide a coherent rationale or justification for how these aspects are selected and tested in relation to one another. Despite this need to better specify the conceptual linkages between ...

  12. PDF Developing a Research Action Plan for Your Organization

    Steps for Creating Action Plans Consider who from your organization should be involved in creating this research action plan. Think about from your organization that will be key in planning and implementing research activities (this may include staff, leadership, board members, clients/community members, partners). 1.

  13. PDF Implementation Practice Guide: Implementation Plans

    Introduction Implementation plans, as the name suggests, are intended to plan for and guide implementation across the four stages: exploration, installation, initial implementation and full implementation.

  14. What is an implementation plan? 6 steps to create one

    An implementation plan—also known as a strategic plan—outlines the steps your team should take when accomplishing a shared goal or objective. This plan combines strategy, process, and action and will include all parts of the project from scope to budget and beyond. In this guide, we'll discuss what an implementation plan is and how to create one.

  15. 18+ SAMPLE Research Implementation Plan in PDF

    How do you implement a thesis? 18+ Sample Research Implementation Plan Research Implementation Plan Template download now Research Study Implementation Plan download now Research and Development Implementation Plan download now Research Asset Management Implementation Plan download now Research Implementation Plan in PDF download now

  16. The Ultimate Guide to Implementation Plans

    A project implementation plan (also called a strategic plan) is a combination of strategy, process, and action. It outlines the steps a team will use to achieve a shared objective. An implementation plan covers all aspects of a project, including the budget, timeline, and personnel. The perfect project plan includes: Objectives, requirements

  17. How To Write a Research Plan (With Template and Examples)

    A research plan is a documented overview of your entire project, from the research you conduct to the results you expect to find at the end of the project. Within a research plan, you determine your goals, the steps to reach them and everything you need to gather your results. Research plans help orient a team, or just yourself, toward a set plan.

  18. PDF Research Implementation Manual

    RAP Research Advisory Panel. A project management-level committee of MDOT staff that oversees a research project. RD&T research, development and technology transfer. REC Research Executive Committee. The senior Executive Committee that sets strategic priorities for the research program and approves the annual program prior to submittal to FHWA ...

  19. PDF Research Implementation Plan

    Strategic Plan for Strengthening Research The Implementation Plan. basis, perhaps two times per year, to keep it current as events and circumstances occur. ... Research Strategic Plan Implementation Schedule Page 1 Project: 6-18-09 Gantt chart Date: Fri 3/26/10. ID Task Name 68 New Hire 2 69 New Hire 3 70 New Hire 4 71 Infectious Disease

  20. Research Implementation Plan

    2013. Description: This document is an example of a completed research implementation plan. Organization Category: State/Province. Organization Name: Ohio Department of Transportation. Country: United States of America.

  21. Top 7 Project Implementation Plan Templates With Samples ...

    4. Project Implementation Plan Presentation Template. Take advantage of this PowerPoint set to run your next project smoothly with a comprehensive implementation plan. It contains pre-designed sections to write phase names, activity details, start & end dates, and the number of days for each activity completion.

  22. FREE 10+ Research Implementation Plan Samples in PDF

    What is a Research Implementation Plan? A research implementation plan is a powerful tool to guide researchers in capturing and analyzing essential information in real time, allowing for the assessment of performance, supporting the scale-up of interventions, and their assimilation into healthcare systems at the national level, supporting the reiterative refinement necessary for successful ...

  23. FREE 10+ Research Implementation Plan Templates in PDF

    1. Research Implementation Plan Template graham-center.org Details File Format PDF Size: 39.8 KB Download Now 2. Research Strategy Implementation Plan Template acecqa.gov.au Details File Format PDF Size: 243.2 KB Download Now 3. Research Implementation Plan Format dot.state.mn.us Details File Format PDF Size: 90.8 KB Download Now 4.

  24. ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

    The H2020-funded PHOENIX project (2022-2025) aims to enhance democratic innovations to implement the European Green Deal (EGD) at local, regional, and national levels, focusing on key policy areas like farm-to-fork, circular economy, energy transition, and healthy soil. Despite the European Green Deal's ambitious goals for a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, it primarily emphasizes technological ...