Weeknotes SE02E11
What did you do?
Environment
This week I attended two meetings where the sole purpose was to share the work we each were doing, to break down silos, and find where our work overlapped. These seemingly inconsequential things have the power to do enormous good across a large organisation, and we each made some genuine connections, and committed to some really positive next steps. Friends will tell you I’m always raving about the skill and commitment of the people at DAWE, and these meetings were no different. It’s such a great thing to just keep finding folks all rowing in the same direction.
Scope
This week the Capability team, (a team I’m part of, as well as being part of the Biosecurity Integrated Information System (BIIS) Enabling Services Team) headed up by Mariam Ibraheim got together to work through the scope and intent of the Digital Delivery Handbook. We’re working in the open on that, and this is where our research + operations handbook will also be held. There’s just so much capability (funny that!) in the team, it’s always an interesting, learning experience working together on stuff.
Organisational context
Organisational context when it comes to research operations, is often about understanding where the organisation is at right now, and working to influence the organisation’s research maturity where possible. It’s also about communicating and developing the return on investment for user research, which is a tricky path.
This week was looking at surveys, CX measurement and the return on investment of investing in adding metadata to raw qualitative data — getting the balance right in terms of aiding findability and discoverability of different types of research data that has different capacities for reuse is going to be critical for me in particular, to ensure we are getting the most out of our research data without wasting time on data with low reuse capacities.
That return on investment can come from the oddest of spaces too — one of the benefits of having a remit that covers the whole organisation is that the benefits don’t always have to be for my particular area. As I thought through our PRISM library maturity model last week, I started to see other opportunities for the taxonomy, and potential spaces for collaboration. As we develop our taxonomies for the library, it would be incredibly exciting to be able to contribute to growing a shared vocabulary across the organisation. That’s what’s tickling the back of my brain at the moment, and I can see several really interesting potential paths there. Mostly, metadata management, especially in a decentralised environment, is about trying to row in the same direction (there’s that metaphor again). It helps us all get to where we want to go, quicker.
People
On the people side of things, I had an interesting conundrum this week that I’ve not really had much before but fully expect to have a lot in the future, as we develop our ‘research as a team sport’ ways of working. That is, how to best continue to support people who have joined as budding researchers in a multidisciplinary team, and then move on again to go back to their ‘regular’ roles? Many people may never come back, but how do you manage that transition and keep providing support when a person has really loved that taste of the discipline? How do you foster curiosity and provide good, safe spaces to grow when the business imperative to do so is gone?
In this instance this week, we agreed to keep in touch with an approximately once a month catch up. I hope to keep sending on interesting articles, and keeping that person in the loop on all things research. For an Ops person in a large organisation, keeping in touch brings its own rewards too, as there’s always more people to discover being out there doing user research on their own. On top of that, the skills and knowledge of the organisation is so valuable too — it’s definitely a two way street of learning and connection!
For that person, I hope it helps keep the home fires burning for them on a discipline they were just sinking their teeth into.
Recruitment and admin
This week on the recruitment side of things, I had an opportunity to see that (light touch) coordination of participant engagement reap some rewards, when we were able to track that some participants had had recent engagement with a different team. While that can work well and even start to turn towards co-design (yay!), we just need to be able to tend to the participant experience. I had to count the teams I was providing support to the other day, and it came to 15 teams, so I’m really pleased the ReOps function is starting to contribute in such a positive way to the process and how we engage with the public.
One of the lead Service Designers in the Intelligence team, Anet Redmer organised a demo of a recruitment platform provided to us by some folks from another research team in the department, and it was exciting to see the possibilities, especially in terms of being able to recruit people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In government, one never builds for ‘average’, it is critical to build for everybody.
Data and knowledge management
This week, other than finishing up the maturity model and increment plan for the PRISM Library, I received a couple of requests for research. At the moment, given there is no library, this is a pretty intensely manual exercise. I’m holding on tightly to the fact that each time I receive a request for research, my list of known and useful research resources and user research grows, which will eventually grow the content of our library solution.
Governance
I ran into research governance as an issue while trying to work out what to share in my research requests — my reflection on that, is that perhaps unlike our ‘pre ReOps’ times, I was able to easily identify and name the issue, and I know how to fix it. I flagged this with recipients (who won’t be able to open the research they don’t have the approval to see), and we will work through this in a way that will get the approvals in place as needed, meaning we’ll never have to wonder again what we can do. Ironically, doing this extra work, which can been seen as a step back, can be an enabler for more sharing. It’s amazing how freeing it is to know that the research has been reviewed and that sharing it is ethical, and approved by the right people in line with information management policies. Where before you might have held back due to lack of clarity, now you suddenly know ‘this is ok, even to print as a poster on a bus stop, of course you can share with the 100 people in that meeting’, so you do. Governance might not be the sexiest topic going, but it sure as anything is an enabler of transformation.
This week I met with some folks to talk about security and privacy, and how to be responsive to the needs of our researchers whilst also maintaining correctness with regards to government policy. Sometimes it is best to just ask the seemingly silly questions. It certainly saves time and confusion.
The moral of the tale with governance, always, is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Have tough conversations. Act with care and diligence and be resilient and persistent.
Tools and infrastructure
Many, many years ago (just a little post the World Wide Web), I worked on an IT Helpdesk for a hotel chain. I really enjoyed that work, not least because they let me study my undergrad during the night shift (yes, I know you’re all getting visuals of the IT Crowd), but also because the satisfaction of getting someone back to work when they have people in front of them or have a deadline is pretty immediate in job satisfaction stakes.
I got a little of that this week, raising a couple of support tickets for our platforms used by our researchers, and also helping out a facilitator in a tricky moment during an online meeting.
I also met with our ICT folks to talk about the process of moving to enterprise wide solutions. Lots to think about when it comes to our strategy for helping researchers do their best work.
What are you thinking about?
I confess this week, I’ve been purposefully thinking less. So I don’t know that I have anything to report here! A dear friend is a yoga teacher and student of ayurvedic medicine, and she’s given me some homework to help me slow my mind. The practise is simple — 10 breaths in the morning with a salute to the sun movement. First thing, as soon as I wake up, before I am distracted by any cries of ‘muuummmm where are my shoes’ etc.
Then, I need to sit before my food at each meal, and take the time to inhale the smell of it deeply, giving thanks to whatever I like, and then just pausing and taking three breaths. It’s amazing how much I notice my digestion has improved, as well as my capacity to just not have racing thoughts. Pretty impressive, and something I can easily keep sticking to!
Anything else?
This week a fellow DAWE person joined the weeknotes train, Tracey M Benson added her first note!
This week I was interviewed for a podcast — my first one being interviewed rather than interviewing, so it feels different to share it with you all. Despite not believing in imposter syndrome, it is indeed ever present :)
Anyway, this podcast is Nodes of Design, and we agreed at work that it fit within our values well — it is a not for profit run by Ravi Tej. The mission is to make design education accessible to all. The primary listener base is in India, and I know from our ResearchOps Community, that UX is hugely emergent in India, as is research operations. At DAWE, we like to work in the open and transparently, and in the ResearchOps Community, we do too. It was lovely to be invited and to get to talk all things ResearchOps.
In the ResearchOps Community, we also published the report from our pilot study on careers in research + operations. In 2020 we did a survey within the community, asking about people’s job titles, salary, place of work and their qualifications and skills. It was really good to hit publish on that this weekend, and again, I think it will be of enormous use to the industry.
