Weeknotes SE02E10
What did you do?
Environment
This week we made some little inroads into getting the environment for scaled research right— mostly thanks to some preparatory work taken on by our senior executives’ Executive Assistant, Leah. EA’s are the best kept secret of any organisation, but they also happen to have exactly the right set of skills for a lot of research operations work. Leah has been helping me set up a research operations inbox, so requests can come through a single source (that importantly doesn’t rely on me being at work to respond via my personal inbox, yay, I can take holidays!), working with me on some of the tools issues, and submitting forms to increase our cloud capacity. If you are reading this, and are starting a ResearchOps team, make friends with EAs, or hire one, if you can. Getting all of this in place helps create the environment we need to scale. Many thanks Leah :)
Another aspect of the ‘Environment’ pillar, is breaking down silos. Some days, this feels like a ReOps person’s main job. This week I connected one team doing a large piece of research with policy analysts turned user researchers (with a tonne of experience in policy, regulation, and the department) to another doing similar work, but with a senior researcher (who was new to the department). It seems like a connection made in heaven, and I look forward to seeing what fruit that might bear.
Scope
This pillar is all about sharing and prioritising insights, understanding methods and protocols and developing research as a team sport. At DAWE, our guild is going through a little bit of change at the moment — we started as just the Busting Congestion researchers with a weekly meeting between about 8 of us. The department also runs a monthly Service Design Community of Practice meet up and a monthly Design Community of Practice. Now the guild is at 25, so we need to spend some time deciding on how, when and why we meet, if the whole guild comes along etc. It’s a lot of calendars to manage so clarity and value is critical. Given it has been one of the most important things we’ve done under the Re+Ops banner — in terms of the breaking down of silos, sharing of best practice and helping researchers get pretty familiar with each other’s work, Tracey (who leads and organises the meetings), me, and the guild want to make sure we make the right decisions. Nurturing (or gardening, as I like to call it) communities is actually very difficult and nuanced work. If you’re looking for a resource on nurturing a community of any size, Priya Parker’s The Art of the Gathering is my go-to on that. I note she’s also giving a free 4 part series (recorded, so don’t worry it is halfway through) called ‘The Gathering Makeover’.
Organisational context
Probably the only thing to report here is that I’m finishing my maturity model for the PRISM Library more or less as I type. I’ve been considering the people, skills, platform, policies and procedures, barriers, effort, user experience and behaviours that each step of the way will need, or will create, and our capacity to meet each of those parts of the steps over the next few increments. I’ve been working on it for the past couple of weeks, but when one is creating something that will work within the context of the organisation, there’s a lot to consider! Y’all know me, I started in the detail, and so the work of the next day or so is to distill that into one consumable message.
People
Training moved onto my radar this week for the first time, (though it’s always been on my ‘Tree of Ops’) as we (in the Capability Team) worked on the scope of our handbooks. As we start to scale, and we focus on research as a team sport, we will find more and more PWDRs (people who do research, — term coined by Kate Towsey) looking for training. At the moment, given I’m a team of one (+ Bill Makin on loan, and help from anyone who has time), that means finding publicly available training and resources for researchers and cataloguing the ones our senior researchers prefer. I can see this will need development, but one thing at a time :)
Recruitment and admin
This week, we looked at platforms and vendors in our efforts to get research participant recruitment a little more self service — we’ve got a three pronged approach to recruitment developing, and this is the third prong. One of our service designers is trying one vendor in collaboration with the Behavioural Analytics Team (within DAWE). The BAT folks have been so supportive as user research has scaled in the department, and we’re so grateful for the collaborative approach everyone has taken.
I met with the Assurance team as they plan their next phase of research, and we went over the approach to manage participant experience over time. It is all starting to feel like the approach is solid, and we know we’re taking care of the participant experience not just for one piece of research, but developing it as a relationship over time, where that’s something they want. Feels good.
The lovely Kim Porter has been doing some work on different vendors for evaluative type research in her organisation, and she shared some of that with a select group of ReOps professionals before she posts about it publically soon. Keep your eyes out for that one as it definitely helped us this week!
Data and knowledge management
This week we made small inroads into setting up the interim solution for our research data and research outputs. There are complexities and constraints built into what we’re doing, as the whole department’s internal systems have ongoing work happening. This means we are planning for what we can implement now, with our eyes on the ways in which that work can carry over into our proposed 2022 solution.
I find this aspect of ReOps to be endlessly fascinating — these small decisions we make are really transformative down the track. This week, we had a chat with some folks from the Queensland government also looking to implement a knowledge management solution, and I said to them that when you implement a user research library, you’re doing transformative work — the best kind, because most of the time, no one notices. You’re transforming how user researchers think of their work, of it’s value and reusability. Suddenly they know for sure someone will read their work, and use it in a different context. That’s daunting, a little bit scary, and also exciting. Why user research would be the one type of research no one ever expects to have referred to again is beyond me, a believer in the work researchers do. You’re also transforming user research data and outputs from a throwaway thing, to an asset, like our data assets, something we have put effort into and want to be able to continue to learn from. I re-listened to my interview with Richard Smith from the Hackney Council in the UK this weekend, and we talk about the tension user researchers feel about people accessing and using their research again, and the worry it will be taken out of context. I won’t cover that here, but of course, that was indeed one of the features of this week when Alzbeta and Chris and I got together to start to workshop a bit of a framework for any research data we might want to make easier to find and reuse. The workshop was a bit adhoc — the few times I’ve done that before has involved an interview and some observational work — watching how researchers think as they work. We’re going to go for a round two next week, and see how we go. Alzbeta shared a fabulous trello board by Jessica Crabb which is a great framework for the process of user research. It was great to see that too, as the IA of it ties in nicely with the work we’re doing in the Research + Operations Handbook.
Governance
Export Intelligence researcher Anthony Winning provided some much needed assistance with making the consent form more usable last week, and I neglected to mention — many thanks Anthony! This is how we move forward, together.
Violet Rish from the Readiness team pressed forward on Privacy Impacts Assessments, while keeping me involved and in the loop, as we’re very much hoping we can arrive at a program wide approach. I’m so grateful to Violet over the past (gosh) 5 months — she’s always had her eyes on the broader implications for the program, provided suggestions, taken action, and pushed hard. Doing the hard work to make things simple ❤
Tools and infrastructure
Let me only say the path to frictionless research is paved with a lot of work on getting access to the right tools. The responsibility of a research operations professional is to always keep one eye on the short term, and another on the long term. It quite literally means living the design principle of doing the hard things to make it simple. We did hard things this week, we will always keep doing the hard things.
What are you thinking about?
Having settled into our new house I’m back to thinking about my PhD work and trying to get stuff written — I’m going through the interviews with the leaders of the company I’m studying, and noticing the ways in which we all actively and a lot of the time unknowingly create unequal environments. I have a little matrix I developed from my literature review for thinking about what I’m hearing — it includes noticing a person’s perceived agency, authority and autonomy (3 A’s) to make decisions that move them towards a more gender egalitarian sharing of paid and unpaid work (the topic of my thesis), the social, structural and environmental factors that impact on the 3A’s, and how power and discourse act as enablers or inhibitors of change.
Alba Villamil shared her ‘Social Inequality Map’ in the Advancing Research Community chat recently, and it covers similar ground (which makes sense, as she’s developed it from sociological concepts, and mine are from social sciences). Just personally, the validation in seeing that from someone whose research practice I admire so deeply is pretty fantastic, I feel like I can keep going!
Aside from my excitement and fangirling, it is incredibly important in user research, where power and inequality are often ignored and embedded aspects of what we’re doing. Alba suggested it is a good map for helping generate a more critical approach in user research. Here it is:
You can find her UXRCollective talk on Researchers as architects of racism livetweeted by Alba with more slides such as these, below:
Anything else?
Our almost 15 year old doggie, Fidel passed away this week. He was the feature of many of my meetings this past 5 months at DAWE, and of course was the feature of our family life. I guess he got me thinking about the nature, privilege, and responsibility of love. A lot of the time it means making decisions that aren’t what you want, or even what’s right for you. It was a privilege to be with him as he passed, and to release him from the world, just as it was a privilege to walk with him through life. Until next time Mr Fidel.
