Sep 5, 2021
Weeknotes SE02E15
What did you do?
Below is a list of my week, set out using my usual format of the 8 Pillars of User Research. I never tire of the framework, and it just works, every day. Hopefully it helps bring some context to my weekly notes, especially for anyone else working in research operations.
Environment
Mostly any movement I made this week in terms of creating the right kind of environment to scale the impact of the craft of user research was to make sure that we could bring people together in digital, online spaces, and to notice and make a couple of connections where I spotted some people doing research where I hadn’t found it before. The middle of the week saw me put together a kind of run sheet for each of the teams doing research that we are supporting. While we do of course, have our work set out for each sprint, that is also aligned to the 8 pillars, not by team. It is too much to keep in our heads (or it is for me!), and I wanted a way to be able to see aligned priorities at a glance. Predictably, I used the 8 pillars as my framework and set about writing the current situation report for each of the pillars for each team. We haven’t quite finished setting it up (there are 22 teams on the board so far, with more to be added), but once we’re done, we’ll be able to quickly spot where our priorities should lie across the program for each sprint. Yes, we will find a better way of doing this. Baby steps.
Scope
We had a weekly check in with one of the teams we had on the board, and it was good to be able to go through our diagnosis of where they were at, and check it aligned with their feeling about where they were at. Some of the points were about scope — struggling with the cadence of the deeper research they need to do, how to bring their data together, and how to share their insights from aggregated data brought together from across the program. I’ve never so keenly felt that I’m behind where they need me to be (in terms of building the library mentioned below), and that’s starting to be a blocker. We have a plan to address this, but all good things take time, so it is a matter of coming up with an interim solution knowing these pain points won’t be a reality for much longer, but feeling deeply we need to solve them now. I know this is a common problem with research operations (the whole flying a plane whilst building it), and I know we are on the right path, it’s just tough to see it.
Organisational context
Not much to report here, though in writing up some 6 monthly stats this week, I did reflect that our organisation is indeed rapidly scaling their research. It can feel a lot some days, but it was nice to step back and see how far we’ve come. Our organisational research maturity is very rapidly changing. Aided very much by a senior executive who get it, and by having such a depth of knowledge across the program.
People
Ruth Ellison and I booked in four people for an induction session on research + operations, and we’re looking forward to welcoming these folks into the research fold this coming week.
Recruitment and admin
This week we made progress in this space, and it was very much a team effort. I met with a team that had been using a vendor to manage their research recruitment, and worked out a path forward to enable other teams to also use this platform. Lots to do, but clarity is a good start!
I developed a self-serve model for automating the logistics of remote research — writing out a guide and a process, giving the researchers the tools they needed to make their lives easier. Looking forward to testing it out beyond the usability testing I did internally and seeing if it helps researchers in real life.
A couple of researchers added a number of people to our managed pool of research participants, and so it really shows that when you are a research operations team of one or two people, to some extent, ResearchOps is also a team sport! We scored some wins with our management of the research participant experience, so this little aspect of the work seems to be progressing a little each week, which makes me happy. Bill carried a lot of the that work this week, and I gotta say, that move from a team of one, to a team of two, is a delightful one indeed! Many thanks again, Bill :)
Data and knowledge management
This week saw me accidentally rip a hole in the space/time continuum between MS Teams and SharePoint, as I tried to get to know tagging in a MS Teams kind of way…thank goodness for there being specialists around to unravel how I managed to do something in one environment and have it appear differently in another. Am looking forward to having some assistance with this stuff moving forwards! All of life is working within constraints, and succeeding in such endeavours (for me, anyway), it seems to involve being unafraid to totally mess things up to work out the boundaries of what’s possible. Trying to remind myself that every step I take is a step that wouldn’t have been possible without ResearchOps as a function, and progress is progress :)
I also put in an official request to make a policy decision to allow me to create governable spaces for our research data. Really finding us in need of this function lately, and it will be good to be able to progress this further.
I had my weekly meet up with the service designers from the end-to-end team, and they raised the urgency of those spaces for research data, the urgency of which I am definitely feeling. We went over their draft process flow for the research, which also gave me a really good idea of their requirements for our MVP taxonomy. I’m workshopping this this week with Bill (in our little ResearchOps team). Once we have a response MVP, we’ll head back out to both this team, and others, to see what they think.
We did have a couple of lovely wins — firstly, our friends at Services Australia sent over some research for us to use internally. It is highly relevant to some work we are doing in the Profile team, and so it will be good to add that to the repository*, and then make it available. While the research is from 2019, it provides a great context to the work the team are doing, and should prove a useful base to add new knowledge to. They’ve asked us to feed our research back to them to help add to their knowledge base, so I’m really looking forward to developing this exchange. We also we were able to add some research to the repository that had approvals — from the research participant, from the researcher, and from the relevant senior executive. I was also able to tag the research with the approval levels, because I’ve taken a small step to making a defined taxonomy, and I was able to share it in a timely manner to someone who really needed it. The fact they felt none of the work done to get to that point was also a win, I think. The best service is the one you don’t notice.
Governance
This week, we did a couple of nice bits of governance — firstly, closing off a loop on some in-demand research, and being able to make it widely available within the department (noted above).
The second was to work with the Profile team to take a programmatic approach to our legal and privacy approvals for the use of a particular platform we’d like to use in our research from the beta stage onwards. The team confirmed their potential use of the product, and we’ve turned that around to writing out our approach for the program and have sent that off for confirmation of the proposed approach. Once we have that in place, as long as we stick within the guide rails, I’m hoping we will be able to proceed sure that we are acting in a compliant way. User research contains a myriad of ethical and legal factors to consider, and having an approved approach across the program will help us move faster, safely.
Tools and infrastructure
This week tools were in high demand whilst also under review more broadly. It felt incongruous to be seeing so much value, and to be able to be so quickly responsive to our research operations users whilst also having to review whether a tool should be in use at all. It shows that this pillar requires us to have a service first approach to helping researchers move fast but also needs that long term attention to the sustainability of a service.
I did a quick count today, and discovered we’ve provided 27 teams with access to the tools they needed to do their jobs in the past 6 months. That feels pretty good.
What are you thinking about?
I’ve been talking a lot about a framework I have developed with my PhD thesis work and using it a lot, and not having any published work to refer to. It’s really starting to frustrate me, so I’ll probably get something out on that sooner rather than later! It describes a nuanced (I hope!) framework for understanding the factors involved in individuals making uncomfortable change based decisions. When you consider I pretty much live and breathe and hang out with people actively seeking change every day, you can probably appreciate the general applicability of it and my frustration with myself for not having published it!
Anything else?
I really enjoyed a couple of threads on twitter recently.
This one by Chris Yiu on effective policy work was a great, succinct introduction to a complex field:
This one, which started from a tweet by Matthew James Waddington and became this very long, and interesting thread from Meng Weng Wong is well worth a read for anyone interested in Rules as Code:
*when I mention ‘the repository’ it is currently referencing a ‘store, or what I’m affectionately calling a ‘bucket’. While yes, we are going to build a user research library, they need to be built on something, and we have a present and growing demand for research. Adding to the ‘bucket’ gives us something to make the structure of the library with. I’ll certainly let y’all know when it steps from being a bucket, to being more of a repository, and again, when it becomes a library. Stephanie Marsh did a wonderful post recently where she set out the difference between a repository and a library (and then some), I’ll let her do the talking :)
