How our team got started in ReOps
By: Stephanie Marsh
Tags: User Research, Researchops, User Experience

We are a Research Operations team of two, supporting about 20 people doing research activities. We work in the UX Research team, within the Springer Nature Digital team. We were both new to the organisation October / November 2019, so we’ve been a team for just over a year now.

This blog post is about the work we did to figure out what Research Operations work needed to be done and what we should prioritise in 2020. Emma Boulton talked about how to get started in ReOps here: https://medium.com/researchops-community/getting-started-with-researchops-f77cd6779554

This details a slightly different approach.

Our objective with this work was to understand current state, perception and the pain points in doing user research in SN Digital. We wanted to identify what work the UX Research team, led by Research Ops needs to do in 2020 based on the needs of the researchers, UXers and digital teams.

Taking into consideration the 8 pillars of research — all the things involved with doing user research regularly in an organisation, research operations are involved in all of them. So we needed to factor in that we are 2 supporting 20 — we can’t do everything.

If you haven’t seen it before this was created by Emma Boulton who is one of the leaders of the global community of Research Ops https://medium.com/researchops-community/the-eight-pillars-of-user-research-1bcd2820d75a

We also took into consideration the strategic departmental objectives for the year.

Methodology

We are 3 workshops, 2 face to face and 1 remote across the 3 main locations of digital teams — London, Berline and Pune. We ran these workshop when we’d been a two for about 2 months.

Each workshop was a combination of exercises based on gamestorming, liberating structures and journey mapping. Identifying pain points in research related to the process of planning, doing and sharing user research, and what we can do about the pain points identified?

The workshop agenda was:

Code of conduct — collective agreement Introduction — to team and our scope Warm up exercise (scenario sharing) Core exercise (researcher journey mapping) Wrap up exercise (what, so what, now what?)

Code of conduct

We asked, what behaviours can we all sign up to, to make sure today is useful, safe and fun for everyone here?

We wanted people to talk freely about what was and wasn’t working for them with the research operations that were already in place. It was slightly easier being new, the criticism didn’t feel personal, but it’s still useful to have a code of conduct for everyone to feel comfortable participating in an internal workshop.

We also summarized past state of research, how things did or didn’t work. What ReOps work had been done so far. What was in progress, in what was on the road map at that point.

The first exercise

The first exercise was to get people to share what was and wasn’t working in terms of research operations, using the liberating structure methodology 1–2–4-all.

Step 1 (5 minutes)

Individually: 1) write on green post its examples of when research ops have worked well for you in the last year 2) write on pink post its examples of when research ops haven’t worked well for you in the last year

Step 2 (5 minutes)

In pairs: Share your examples. Does it make you think of anything else? Write it down. Do you have duplicates can they be merged?

Step 3 (10 minutes)

Whole group: Share one good example that stood out to the group. Share one fail that stood out to the group.

Repeat the cycle until run out of time (or discussed all the key things).

We used event cards as prompts for participants to share both positive and negative experiences.

The second exercise

The next exercise was journey mapping the research process including the stages, tasks, and tools.

The third exercise

We identified pain points, their consequences and opportunities to fix them using the liberating structure exercise: What, So What, Now What.

We ran a 4th similar but adapted workshop with the UX leads.

Then… there was so much analysis!

Step 1

We started by writing everything up, all the raw data was captured in an old fashioned spreadsheet.

Step 2 a

Next was the first round of affinity diagramming. The UX Research Team split up the raw data and pulled findings out of it and wrote them down on post its, and then we grouped them. This took about 3–4 hours over 2 sessions

Step 2 b

Then wrote it all up in the mega spreadsheet.

Step 3 a

We refined the groupings together as a team in another session. Adding sub groups and moving findings if they sat better in another group. All done through discussion and consensus.

Step 3 b

Then wrote that up in The Spreadsheet.

Step 4

We crossed reference our sub groups with the departmental strategic objectives to identify the correlations. We used tagging and analysis in Reframer (from Optimal Workshop) to do this. And we began to see patterns in the data of where the biggest areas of pain points were.

Step 5 a

Then we came up with some initial ideas of potential actions we could take as the UX Research team and as SN digital. We discussed, amended and agreed as a team. We used the structure below to structure our ideas.

Step 5 b

The potential actions were structured as short, medium and long term actions for the different problems we identified.They were also roughly ordered by size of the problem — as indicated by the amount of feedback, the type of feedback and our observations.

Step 6 a

I created a few artefacts to help summarise what we’ve learnt and think about how to prioritise the work we do, such as the Sophistication — Impact Matrix. This was to help us think through what the foundational work was that should be done first and then built upon with more sophisticated things.

I summarised all the journey maps into one to share with all those who participated in the workshops.

Step 7

I input all the actions we’d agreed into a trello board with an initial rough prioritisation based on the sophistication/impact matrix and the experience map.

Step 8

We discussed as a team the prioritisation and moved cards around to reflect our agreed priorities.

The board also includes a long term work column, to be prioritised, and archived column.

Most of the outputs were useful at the time to help us think through the data and analysis and what it all meant, but we don’t refer back to them, now our knowledge and understanding has moved on. However, we are still using this Trello board, each quarter we review and reprioritise as a whole team the strategic things we will work on next. We have another trello board to track the detailed work.

Final thoughts

The workshops really helped our understanding of the research process and team dynamics as new people. It also helped with building relationships with the people the ReOps team support.

Research operations are never finished, we balance tactical and strategic work each day between us as a team of two. This also means our roles require us to do user research, service design, service delivery, engagement with all sorts of stakeholders and change management, as even changing things for the better can cause distribution. Covering all these different areas keeps it interesting and I’m always learning!