Creating lasting and sustainable change and developing collaborative relationships between researchers, stakeholders, and healthcare teams is a recognised challenge. Healthcare leaders and organisations struggle with how to make research informed decisions, because of the need for immediate and timely research data. Scoping studies, or the integration of a rapid study at the pre-design stage is a methodological approach within the framework of rapid qualitative research and evaluation. In this paper, we discuss how to implement a targeted, evidence based scoping study which has been developed iteratively based on stakeholder engagement. In our experience, a scoping study can be carried out in as little as 5 days or as long as six weeks. A scoping study can be used to make collaborative decisions on research priorities, and function as an evaluability assessment that can be delivered in time sensitive contexts. This paper provides a step-by-step guide for the design and implementation of scoping studies as well as a case example of how we have applied this approach.