Weeknotes SE02E03
It was a BIG week for all the important, but boring* stuff. Lucky the weather cooperated with persistent rain every single day, and kept me on track, unlike the little arrow on the edge of the boatshed on my daily walk, always pointing me to the sea as if to say, go on, jump in! Not this week, little arrow, not in this weather.
Hi friends, yep, this weeknote is a day late — it is a long weekend this weekend, in honour of the Queen’s birthday, and so I’m taking Monday to be like Sunday in this instance, and spent yesterday instead trekking through mud and picking off leeches (note to self: maybe you should have been writing weeknotes instead?). Happy birthday (belated, I believe), to the Queen.
What did you do?
Monday
Monday was reviewing a research plan with the Export Intelligence team, thinking through the participant recruitment, tooling, reviewing the research gathered for pre-discovery, and stakeholder engagement. It was really well thought out and massive kudos to the whole team for the work they’re doing
In a meta way, it was also an opportunity to review the templates we’ve been iterating — this is the third team to use the plan, which originated from an amalgamation of templates from my own store of templates and ones that were already in use in the department. The department has a mature research practice in several areas, one being Behavioural Analytics, and they’ve been a key partner in the collaborative effort that is doing something across silos, which research operations calls us to do. Being the new kid on the block, I’ve really appreciated the spirit with which the existing researchers in the department have approached my role, and the broader opportunities it represents.
In thinking through co-design and doing an online facilitation, I also had the wonderful opportunity for a quick masterclass from the master of online facilitation, Jessie Callaghan of the NSW gov. Jessie is a friend of many years now, from working in OneTeamGov spaces, and also in the ResearchOps Community. She took me through some of the things she’s learnt about online facilitation, which was super useful, thanks Jess!
Monday also brought with it the opportunity to support another team in the department with access to current consent and information sheets, and to plan a get-together with our legal and privacy teams and all the leads of user research across the department so we can create some department wide resources (doing some co-design as above!). In amongst that, we will also be creating an incentives policy as well, which will enable us to take further steps towards a self service model on participant recruitment.
Tuesday
Tuesday was a day of meetings but I did get to provide some support in reviewing some resumes for a team doing some recruitment staffing wise! Days of meetings may seem like a waste, but when you are remote, and most people are not, those stand ups and catch ups are critical face to face time for me and an opportunity to listen. There’s a lot of nuance in this work — so much of it is about connecting people and things and picking up on cues. It’s especially challenging when most people have never had the luxury of a ReOps person in the team, it can be difficult for researchers and leaders alike to know when to ask for help!
Wednesday
Wednesday was a sad day, saying goodbye to Kristyn Jackson, who has gone to a new exciting opportunity. One thing I have learnt from experience is the importance of a ResearchOps focused exit interview. All researchers (except for Kristyn, as it turns out!) have their stuff sitting on their desktop, their personal folders and emails with research. As the person who takes on responsibility for research data governance when the lead researcher moves on, it is critical for me to hear from the researcher themselves about their assessment of the ethical risk of each piece of data and output. I need to know where to find the consent forms that match the data, and the researcher’s usual hidden ways of re-identifying the data, should the participant contact to opt out. As the knowledge manager, and someone at the beginning of the road for building a library of our user research, it’s also a wonderful opportunity to gather, like a bower bird, all the pieces of gold research a person has gathered in their pre-discovery explorations. Good libraries are made of such stuff! In the end, Kristyn had already done all of this work, and so it was a lovely tour of everything she’d done. Many thanks Kristyn, for your passion for research and operations, it was a pleasure to work with you :)
Thursday
Thursday was technical Thursday, working through some options for our platform for our library. It’s an incredibly challenging environment in which to attempt something department wide, and I found myself missing the skills of the architect of the previous library I led in my previous position. The team were super helpful, and we quickly arrived at a ‘for now’ solution to my immediate needs (that research data governance I noted above and the handover of lots of resources to be made available), and some answers to questions I had about our longer term plans. The team I was talking to also do their own user research (which I didn’t know until then!), and they’re excited about the prospect of someone working on this for the department.
Friday
Friday was meeting with Gus Barrios, who is responsible for data architecture and governance for our program. I had questions about research data governance, data control, metadata management, and wanting to start thinking about taxonomy integration into the structure of whatever library we make. It was great to catch up again. He’s in the same team as me but we work on quite different things , so we don’t get a lot of face- to- face time. Now that I’m moving more into data storage, I suspect he and I will be chatting a lot more regularly!
I also met with a team working on cataloguing our business process models, and we had a good chat about controlled vocabularies and folksonomies, about longer term implications of user centred approaches, and how we could leverage each other’s work.
Then I met with Bill in our team who has agreed to come help me work on our research and operations handbook, which we are putting together on GitHub. Bill has a background in teaching, and so capability building and designing effective packages of information is right up his alley. I couldn’t be happier about the help, and access to his impressive skill set!
What are you thinking about?
Working across every one of the 8 Pillars of User Research requires such a depth and breadth of skills. There’s the skills of strategic planning, communication (including legal and technical writing, as well as good storytelling), stakeholder management, but then also library sciences, metadata management, information management, designing taxonomies, data governance, information architecture, front-end development, procurement, legislation, and policy design, implementation and development. It’s helpful to have strong skills in a diverse range of research methods to enable you to deeply understand your ‘users’. You need to also design or be able to understand how to design a good user interface for any of the platforms you make to provide a digital home for UX. You need to be a good trainer, to understand the ins and outs of getting access to tools. You need to be able to bring people together, to break down silos, and know how to make safe spaces for people to learn with and from each other. It’s a really big job. I can see why it is something I enjoy — I love that I get to use different skills each day, and to learn. Every day is different! But mostly, I reiterated at the start that this wasn’t a job I could do alone. During the week, one of the Directors of one of the research teams already in the department underlined how happy he was to see our collaborative efforts evolving, and indeed, I had some tough tricky issues this week. The broader research community we’re building in the department helped me out, and picked me back up, dusted me off and I went back in. You can’t ask for more than that.
Anything else?
I went on a bit of a journey of discovery this weekend in my thinking about what happens at the end of the research pipeline, as it is so pertinent to the purpose of research operations — scaling impact. In my years of working on this stuff, I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at how we measure research impact, and indeed, in academia it is a whole field of it’s own. I’d never been able to find any empirical research about how the mode and method of delivery of research might impact on research uptake. In thinking about building a library, it’s obviously critical. In doing the research repositories project in the ResearchOps Community, I did about 30 of the interviews myself, interviewing people from across the industry (from the 200,000+ person companies, to the companies of 5 in government and private enterprise) and had only found rudimentary ways of measuring research impact, let alone measuring the impact of research libraries. I knew of some work, such as this great piece of research by the Australian Library and Information Association (2013) on the ROI of ‘special libraries’ (for every $1 spent, there is an ROI of $5.43). But I couldn’t find much. How much does the mode of delivery (story, video, user journey etc) affect the uptake of research? What about the delivery method? Is digital always worse than face to face? The field of user research provides lots of anecdotal evidence, but nothing particularly solid that I could find. I reached out to the research community on twitter. Hoo boy did they come through for me….
They came through for me so very much, that I had to do a lot of reading, and sorting, and then I wrote it all up before I could forget it. My Saturday, it is safe to say, was a binge session of reading in the highest order. Thank goodness for the persistent rain keeping me indoors! Many thanks again to all who contributed.
*I guess we can all tell I don’t find it boring :) Here I’m talking about research governance, data, information, metadata, and knowledge management.
