3 steps to developing a research plan that all your stakeholders will love
Plans that are too long or technical don’t work when dealing with multidisciplinary profiles… but having no plan is even worse. In order to make sure your research results are actionable, the planning should be clear, collaborative, quick, and easily digestible.
In this article, we’ll explain the 3 steps you need to follow to make a research plan that will please all stakeholders: A single-page document that can be easily understood by anyone who picks it up.
After reading this, you’ll be able to put together a plan that:
- Facilitates meaningful and personalized communication with your stakeholders
- Fosters alignment and transparency
- Will be actionable, clear, and concise
👤 Step 1. Identify who the stakeholders are
Objective: Meaningful and personalised communication
A lot of people in your business are undoubtedly interested in knowing where the product is headed. That’s why you should also consider them when planning your research because everything you learn in the process will influence the direction of the product.
You need to be fully aware of how each stakeholder will be involved in the project you are working on in order to ensure any research carried out addresses the key concerns. It should also ensure our communication and deliverables meet expectations.
An exercise that may be of use to you at this point, is mapping out all stakeholders according to their level of influence and interest in the project your team is working on:
This is not something you have to do for every research project but if you do it once, you can then assess whether any stakeholders’ degree of influence or interest varies or if a new stakeholder is added.
It’s also useful to review the functions of each type of stakeholder, as well as the style and frequency of communication you will have with them.
💬 Step 2. Understand what you need to know
Objective: Alignment and transparency in research objectives
our research plan approach will vary significantly depending on the stage you’re at and where you need to get to:
- Do you want to explore the opportunities you have in your team?
- Are you deepening your knowledge of a previously selected opportunity?
- Do you need to corroborate an assumption?
Something you can do to help understand the primary research objectives, is to bring your team members and key stakeholders (those with the greatest influence) together and get them to write down what they feel we need to learn. Get each participant to write some research objectives individually and then you can pool the ideas.
During that pooling, you can discuss what to include in or leave out of the scope of this research and group similar objectives together.
When planning research, it is crucial to prioritise the most relevant objectives, as the less relevant ones may be left out of the plan if time is very limited.
We recommend specifying a deadline for the study during this session.
🗒️ Step 3. Complete the Research Plan
Objective: A clear, concise, and actionable Research Plan
Who compiles the Research Plan?
By this point, you should have all the information necessary in order to put together a research plan on your own and share it with stakeholders so they can give you feedback. You can use the same process to do this. Likewise, I’d encourage you to build the research plan collaboratively if the dynamics of your working environment allow you to do so.
The first step is to identify the people who can help you in creating your research plan. It’s crucial to get the specialists who will be part of the Main Team in the same room (physical or digital) when doing Discovery. Review the research objectives to decide who it makes sense to include in the session:
- Are there business-related research objectives? Bring in profiles that can help in this area, such as Product Owners, Business Developers, Data Analysts…
- Are there technology-related research objectives? Get hold of tech profiles like engineer managers, developers…
- Are there user-related research objectives? Involve a Data Analyst, a UX Designer, a Researcher…
If you’re carrying out a highly ambitious research project involving a wide range of people, you can conduct different sessions to deal with the different research objective categories. You should always keep things as simple as possible and think carefully about who can contribute the most to each session.
What should your research plan include?
The starting point of your research plan should be the priority research goals. For each one of those, you should consider:
- Methodologies: What methodologies can help you achieve the research goal in the least time and with sufficient confidence levels?
- Tasks: What tasks will you have to perform to achieve the research objective, using the selected methodology?
- Roles: Who will be responsible for achieving the research goal? Will they need help from others in order to do this? Will they also be responsible for all related tasks?
- Estimates: What is the minimum time period this could take? What would be the optimal time period?
- Participants: Will we need participants? If so, how many will we need and how will we find them?
- Deliverables: What deliverables will be submitted to communicate the findings? What minimum information do we expect to obtain from these deliverables?
Remember that a research plan must have the potential to be iterated as you move forward. It is not a contract, it’s a guide to help you stay organised.
Once we have this information, we can draw up a small roadmap which will include all the research objectives and the estimated time scales. We can decide on the maximum duration of each of the objectives and choose whether or not to discard less relevant ones.
Having control over the progress of a research project will help us to iterate as we move forward.
In this regard, we recommend using timeboxing by sprints to reflect your estimates in order to see how the research plan is progressing (as you can see in the picture). If you don’t work with Sprints, you could go by weeks or even months if it is a very long project.
We recommend the research plan fit on a single page. It should be simple and easy to understand for anyone who consults it.
👉 And last but not least…
Once you’re ready, share it with the stakeholders who have the greatest influence and interest, in order to be aligned before you begin to refine tasks any further.
Once you’re all on the same page, refine the activities as you would normally do within the team and add them to JIRA or whichever tool you use to monitor your tasks.
