Weeknotes SE02E12
What did you do?
Environment/Organisational context/People
I’m putting these three pillars together this week because there’s such a lot else in the post, but also because all I really want to report is that this week, we welcomed Ruth Ellison to the Capability Team, as the Research Lead, and to say that I’m happy to work alongside Ruth is putting it mildly. Ruth is responsible for my first experience as a user researcher and we also worked alongside each other in a volunteer capacity doing the What is ResearchOps project in the ResearchOps Community. Welcome Ruth!
Scope
This week in the ‘Scope’ pillar, I did a little bit of work on ‘research as a team sport’ doing a ResearchOps induction for a new-to-research person in LAE team brought in from our business team. She brings a wealth of experience working alongside our industry partners, knows the legislation, regulation, people and systems intimately. The team are really looking forward to getting into the field (virtually!) really soon.
Recruitment and admin
This week saw the Assurance team engaging with business areas in order to start their participant recruitment. It was great to be able to look at the proposed list of participants, and to be able to track their previous participation with us. Working in this space means only having a limited number of people to call on to provide us with their assistance in understanding their lived experience, and so it is critical to think about the research participant experience. There were a few on the list who had either been previously engaged, or who were already participating in research. Being able to prove the return on investment on that panel work for the program is a good feeling indeed. We welcomed a new researcher to the team as well, and I was able to provide her with a checklist, relevant forms and a sense of the process, and that felt pretty good too. There’s still so much to do, but nice to be able to reflect on how far we’ve come as well.
Data and knowledge management
Each week I dedicate some time to foundational work. That can look like work on the handbook (thanks to Bill for continuing to work on that!), work on governance, privacy or consent, or it can take the form of working on the foundations required to enable me to scale our knowledge management. Just as with recruitment, we’ve come a long way, and still have a long way to go on the governance of knowledge management, but this week, we started work on our ‘PRISM Groups’ interim space for each team doing user research to store their work. The department granted us a first for the department — locked MSTeams channels so that we can effectively govern access to the data held within each space. These group spaces will give us somewhere safe to store our recordings and videos, and we will be able to grant access on a channel by channel basis. While we are trying to extend the use and reuse of our raw research data where appropriate, we also must be careful to stay within the National Health and Medical Research Council Guidelines, the Australian Privacy Principles, and data, information, and records management governance policies within the department.
I said many times this week that just because something is hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do a thing, and this space is one such area. One of the reasons user research libraries are rare, is that sharing human research is hard. It’s great to be able to apply everything I’ve learned over the years to enable a hard thing to be easy.
Our PRISM Groups spaces are currently just ‘buckets’ to put unstructured data though, and another bit that is super hard but so worthwhile, is making the research data and our outputs discoverable, findable, searchable and consumable. Our friends in the Behavioural Analytics Team run the department’s Design Community of Practice, and they allowed me to take over the monthly meeting this week with a workshop designed to give researchers space to think about their internal framing (how we understand the world), the broader philosophy of user research, and the theoretical basis on which everything stands. User research tends to sit in a post-modern space, and a lot of the time, sometimes without knowing it, researchers are using Grounded Theory approaches to understanding their data. I tend to be a constructivist, although, as the workshop showed me, I probably am more of a Grounded Theory Constructivist than I had previously realised. After I covered these factors and their relationship to research repositories, it was time to play and see what we could see.
Together, we each listened to an interview that used an interview guide from a recent behavioural sciences research project and did whatever we normally do in terms of taking notes. We then took 10 minutes to analyse and synthesise (as best we could in that time!). Then we compared each of our approaches with the researcher explaining what they did and how. We then stepped back from that to consider what we had used to categorise the interview — most people considered motivations and behaviours, demographics and noted things pertinent to work (our internal models for how we categorise our work by commodity or by service etc).
Why would we do this? How is this relevant to a research library?
While for the researchers, the outcomes of the workshop were looking at their own internal frames and models, for me, it was to see if there were consistencies that I could turn into a taxonomy of tags we could use to make their research data easier to search. The goal is to find similarities that would work across a group of researchers, so that we can then make a database of research data we can dip into, rather than disparate files of interviews and notes that need to be read through completely in order to find if it is relevant to our search. It was the first time I’d done that kind of work at that speed and with so many people at once (we had around 30 people), so it was a fabulous opportunity from a knowledge management perspective.
My biggest new learning was that despite the fact that most of the researchers weren’t behavioural scientists, they mostly looked at aspects of behaviour and motivation — seemingly stemming from the research question, which was embedded with behavioural terms. We all know how important a research question is, but I’d never have imagined how much it would frame how you understand the data as well.
Governance
Nothing much to report on governance this week! There’s plenty to do, I just didn’t have time to make any progress on this aspect of work this week except for looking at a proposed governance and administration model for one of our platforms we use for managing research (see below :) )
Tools and infrastructure
This week I sent a request to one of our critical platform partners to ask to downgrade our subscription plan. Adrian has been working hard on this one — making sure we make the right decisions for the right reasons. As predicted, downgrading is a lot more painful than the simple but expensive task of upgrading, but needs must. There are so many factors in our decision making. I wish it were easier to work with big platform companies to perhaps create subscription options that work. It is that tension they also have I suppose between bespoke approaches, and scale.
Another platform we use extensively in the department is at risk of being removed as the admin of it is seen as becoming too cumbersome. Another moment for me to pull out my opinion that just because it is hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We’re proposing a decentralised approach to the management of the subscription, but a centralised approach to governance and admin — with each branch admin forming a community of admins who can lean on each other for support, and to develop a common approach to the governance of the data held within. Fingers crossed that the administration effort being shared with the surety of that centralised approach to governance will be enough to a) remove the world of pain we are in and b) allay any potential concerns over our governance.
What are you thinking about?
I wrote A LOT about knowledge management and building user research libraries this weekend. It was cathartic, and long overdue for me personally. Nice to have a brain dump out in the ether. I hope I didn’t make too many of my real librarian friends cringe! Let me know your thoughts.
Anything else?
Earlier in the week, a friend said to me that he was feeling a little bit envious of the work, and the people, and the momentum we have around the practices we’re growing. I mentioned that in passing to my senior execs. They wanted me to pass on the challenge — don’t be jealous, join us! So, if you do want to join us, let us know!
Mostly just sending very supportive vibes to folks around the country going into lockdowns, or continuing to be. Stay safe, friends.
