Experiences from the ResearchOps Conference 2023
My experiences from attending a virtual conference about “research operations”, a relatively new area on user research within mainly corporate settings.
I attended the online ReOps Conference from November 16-17, 2023. I wrote some notes from the conference that I had intended to write up and share as a post, but it was always low priority so I never got around to it. We’ve been making some good progress on the Seedcase Project, so I’ve gotten some time to finally write up a post on my experiences from this conference.
Research operations, also abbreviated as ReOps or ResearchOps, is a relatively new field. It is, paradoxically, not about research in traditional research settings, but mainly about (or at least started in) user research in largely corporate settings. Confusingly, there is also the field of operations research, which is the math and science of management and decision-making that arose during World War II. The community agreed on the following definition of ResearchOps:
“ResearchOps is the people, mechanisms, and strategies that set user research in motion. It provides the roles, tools and processes needed to support researchers in delivering and scaling the impact of the craft across an organisation. — ResearchOps Community
The ResearchOps Community organised an online conference in November 2023. Unfortunately, most of the talks were heavily focused on specific corporate settings, needs, and experiences so I didn’t get much out of them. However, there were a few talks that I found interesting and relevant to our work. Here are some notes from those talks:
Unlocking research operations: Implementation and impact within established UR teams
This talk, by Rachel Mare of the Scottish government Research Ops team, went into how they integrated ResearchOps into their existing user research teams within the government. A few points I found interesting from her talk were about getting buy-in from senior management as well as some basic practicalities of actually implementing ResearchOps within the Scottish government.
For getting buy-in from senior management, she suggested the following:
- Address, recognise, and emphasise any fears they may have for the change.
- Prepare for any concerns they may have about implementation by having come up with a plan or plans beforehand.
- Make it really clear what the purpose is and what the goals are for what ResearchOps will achieve within the organisation.
- Do as much research as possible on the actual problem you hope to solve with ResearchOps.
- Bring clear, tangible solutions when discussing with them, not just point out the problems that exist.
- Senior management listens strongly to cost-benefit analyses, so do one before meeting with them.
She also described some practical challenges and considerations they had to face before implementing ResearchOps as well as during it:
- Deciding what software to use, as any software needs to go through security clearance. If at all possible, make use of existing tools that already have clearance.
- For any new tool or process, research into what the benefits are and how they can lower the cost for doing work.
Make work visible: ReOps from side hustle to sustainability
I really enjoyed Lauren Galanter’s talk on some really tangible and practical things to do to implement ResearchOps in an organisation. I liked her talk because this applies to many different topics and fields, not just ResearchOps. She talked about how ResearchOps is almost like someone’s “side hustle” within an organisation. They do it sporadically, with limited support or resources, often on their own, and with a lot of resistance or lack of understanding from others. Her main points were:
- Make the work you do visible, concrete, and discrete.
- Use a board or some other visualisation tool to show what you’re working on
- Capture as much content as possible on this board or issue list, including all ideas, tasks, requests.
- Keep track of time spent on different tasks as data for insights later on, so that you can use that later on to justify things.
- Don’t hide work, show it off as much as possible!
- Incorporate and make use of Agile principles:
- Make use of iterations, which are focused, time-bounded periods of work on a specific set of tasks.
- Use a Kanban board to put work up and show what’s in progress and what’s done, availabe in tools like JIRA or GitHub Projects.
- Using the Kanban board, limit the amount of items in the “work in progress” column.
- Focus on a few projects at a time, and within those projects do as few tasks as is reasonable at any given time.
- Prioritise small, incremental improvements over bigger, irregular improvements.
- Value ideas or requests, but you don’t need to commit to them. This helps fight against “what about this…” or “help with that…”. Keep focused on what you or your team want to achieve.
Conclusion
While most talks weren’t particularly relevant to me, I did find the ones that were interesting to be very useful. So overall, it was a worthwhile conference to attend. Would I attend again? I’m not too sure, it may still be too heavily corporate focused and too specific to those environments to be of relevance for me at this point.