Weeknotes SE02E02
Hey friends, and welcome to my second weeknote for 2021, where I reflect on the week, in particular in my role as ResearchOps Lead for the Australian government’s Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment. The above image is a great example of many of the things in our remit and happens to be a photo taken from about 2/3’s of the way up kunanyi/Mt Wellington in Hobart, where I live. One of my favourite things about working in government is how you can simply look around you to see where your work has impact.
What did you do?
Monday
One of the cool and also challenging things about research operations, is that you needfully work across silos. The department has a very long history of academic research, and a LOT of the people working for the department are researchers and scientists. Monday saw me briefly hanging out with a Professor at the University of Melbourne who is working with the department on similar kinds of problems I am working on in user research. We did some brainstorming and thinking through the problems of creating a system for gathering and storing research. How to make it discoverable, findable, consumable. How to improve search via the use of user centred metadata. I’ve added a couple of links at the bottom of the page to some useful papers if anyone wants to nerd out on metadata.
Tuesday
saw me working with researchers on different approaches to managing the growing demand for research and working with some of the amazing folks working in the Export Readiness space on considering some manageable long term approaches to research recruitment.
Wednesday
I got to say my first hello to Adrian Yee in our Capability Team stand up. As Jordan noted in his weeknotes, Adrian has come on board as our Design Lead, and comes with an impressive set of skills and experience. It’s such a privilege to have a whole team of people where it is our job to build capability and provide support to all the people working in this space across the department. There’s significant skills in the people already here, it’s wonderful to augment and build on that. Speaking of, I also got to catch up with Finn Blucher, the Transformation Coach — another member of the Capability Team, so we could work out how our ‘glue work’ fits together and how we can supplement each other’s efforts.
Thursday
was meetings with folks from across the department, hearing each other’s stories, working out potential collaborations and looking at our ways of working. It feels like real change is coming in taking that programmatic approach to research. It won’t be easy, but days like this tell me it will be worth it. We also had our guild catch up, which is also coming together nicely as we work asynchronously and across a lot of geographical distance. Just loving the leadership of Dr Tracey Benson in this space.
Friday
Was thinking about how we can better ensure we are reaching a diverse range of people in our research participants, thinking and sharing with other research teams on the topic of research ethics, and also talking to some friends in other government departments about measuring customer/client experience (yep, last week’s theme). We also did our usual showcase, and it really is wonderful to see everyone ‘showing the thing’ and lovely to have the chance to say our shoutouts at the end.
What are you thinking about?
I haven’t really got any well-defined words about it at the moment, but the back of my mind is noodling on the pointy ends of scaling impact — on how we deliver really human centred research. When I say human centred, I’m not talking about the content, but the delivery. Over the years, I’ve done several investigations into any known best practice on what makes people pick up, consume, understand and take action from user research (and research!). Though I found quite a lot of hunches (general consensus is people want videos, they want good stories, they want to know what it means to them, for their context), there doesn’t seem to be any established best practice except in the field of marketing…but then I saw this tweet below, and wondered if my search terms have just been wrong this whole time:
Something for the back of my brain to keep noodling on for a while. Meanwhile, the good folks at the Turing Institute were equally excited about this thing called ResearchOps, so perhaps I’ll learn something about research application management sooner rather than later! I’ll keep you posted :)
Anything else?
In the ResearchOps Community, we just published our latest episode of the ResearchOps podcast, an interview with Adam Banks, founder and Director of UX-Study who also ran the ResearchOps team at Google until 2016. So worth a listen — we talk about the service design of research operations, on skills needed to do ResearchOps, about research ethics and not getting in the way of researchers. We talk about research libraries (Adam set up the Google User Research Library), and scaling the impact of research. It’s such a privilege to get to hear from the industry’s experts, and I’m so pleased to be able to record some of the chats I have each week for the whole community (and you!) to share.
