Oct 29, 2018
Distributed analysis on a global scale: treading lightly among giants and friends in order to grow ‘flowers’
First off, the TL:DR: here’s the ‘What is ResearchOps’ model that brings all of the workshops and survey into one space. Read on to find out how we did it, what it is and why (plus some bonus walk through of how to use the model).
It’s been 8 months since Kate Towsey started the amazing community that is ResearchOps.
Every time I sit down to write something about the ResearchOps journey as it’s been for me, I’m acutely aware that I’m here like a child walking through a hundred year old wood, I’m surrounded by the giants of the space I inhabit. They’re graceful, kind and generous. I am filled with gratitude every day.
Knowing this is how I feel sets the tone for how on earth we managed to pull together the beautiful and the ‘heck yes! I’m printing this big and I’m sticking it on my wall’ ResearchOps framework, which you can find in many forms and mediums on Kate Towsey’s post here. (Trust me, you’re going to want to do that)
Briefly, to quote Kate, “ a team of 60 organisers have run 34 workshops around the world to understand researchers’ challenges and triumphs, and their thoughts about what research operations should include. We also ran a survey that received 300+ responses. We nicknamed the effort #WhatisResearchOps. It’s been an initiative that has seen researchers, researching researchers across the world to inform the advancement of research!’”
The trick though, once we got way, way, way past the 5 workshops we thought we’d do, was how on earth were we going to make sense of it all? We did it, as Kate said, across countless meetings, get together’s, chats and hours caught here and there between the busy lives we all lead. The workshops themselves were designed incredibly well by the core of team ReOps, based on the research questions the team had put together. These guides gave us the bones of a framework, which we put in Trello to start the synthesis. It was a good start, but we needed a better way to manage the tagging and some way to extract and search for the patterns. It was at that point the Community (with a capital C) came to rescue in the form of a gift of a year’s worth of access to Aurelius from CEO, and community member, Zack Naylor. Zack added all the data from Trello, which had the tags already created by Emma Boulton. She’d created these following her preliminary analysis of the results of the survey we ran prior to the workshops. Researchers added new tags and insights into Aurelius, and eventually, we had 3161 individual notes in Aurelius, 672 of which were about ‘what is ResearchOps’.
Just getting to this bit was a mammoth effort on the part of each of the 60 organisers. It is a rich pool into which I imagine we’ll all wade from time to time throughout the next little while as we gather more insights and make new discoveries.
We still had a huge problem though. How to get from all of this to something that wasn’t completely and utterly overwhelming? I have to say, at this point I went a little rogue….
I’d seen a few friends posting some beautiful mind maps using Kumu, and I had done a mind map of the survey data to help me make sense of the ‘what is ResearchOps’ question from that data. I wanted to use Kumu to see if having a map we could wade through, zoom in and out of, would help us with the synthesis.
To quote Amelia Earhart, sometimes the ‘most effective way to do it, is to do it’.
We were literally drowning in stories and notes, the first step was the hardest! Calling on my by now trusty friend Zack, who bore my questions and feedback with incredible patience and grace, we extracted all of the data that contained the ‘what is ResearchOps’ tag into a spreadsheet. I began a synthesis of the notes using the same framework as I’d used on the survey data, thinking it would be nice to pull them together into one huge map.
The responsibility of all that data that belonged to these giants - my friends in the Community- was heavy. Unlike the survey data, where I’d used a few shortcuts to get to the ‘things’ that ResearchOps is, I knew I’d have to pull apart each and every one of those 672 notes by hand. All that late night work done by all those people demanded nothing less.
I did a bit at a time- an hour on the couch next to my kids after dinner, half an hour before breakfast, starting with 50 and then creating the bones of the map. I quickly realised I’d need to reattach the notes to the tags and the workshops so that I could add in their tags, and the places they came from. Back to the Community: I called on everyone to help me by adding the place name to each note in Aurelius so that I could search for each of them and add the extra contextual stuff to the spreadsheet. I made the first map and excitedly messaged Kate Towsey and Andrew Maier. It looked as though it would work.
After a few more days, I messaged the Community and confessed I’d started the global analysis of the question ‘what is ResearchOps’ by making a data model, and that I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t deliver, but that it looked as though it would work, did they mind? They responded resoundingly with their trust, so on I pressed.
It was a big job.
Soon, I came to the place I’m at now, 808 ‘things’ that ResearchOps is. There’s still just under 400 things to go, but it looks as though I’m starting to get to the edge of what’s possible for the map to contain. In any case, after going through each of the workshop project in Aurelius and making sure I had a good representative sample from each, the patterns are clear.
Here’s a little taster of what we found:
Building capability is a huge part of the ResearchOps role as the image above shows. That capability includes assisting researchers to access training and resources to build their capability in their craft, and building capability in ResearchOps itself.
The data showed a clear need for a framework of some sort. For research, for ResearchOps, for recruitment, for knowledge management. You name it, people are calling out for frameworks, guides, templates.
ResearchOps is a leadership role. Research needs leaders, and the operations of research needs it’s own kind of leader. One that is a bridge between the research (and research leader) and the organisation.
There’s a distinct hybrid role for ResearchOps people. The pendulum between research and information architecture swings a long way towards IA within the ResearchOps discipline itself. There seems to be a natural gravitation of user researchers who have an affinity with information architecture within the community, and it shows in the work we have to do in building libraries, repositories, structures for finding research, managing research and maintaining research and data (data gardening).
Info about the model:
The model is free for you to use under the Creative Commons License ShareAlike 4.0. Please expand on it, share it and modify it but always give credit to the ResearchOps Community as its source.
Where possible, please share what you learn back to the Community so we can keep growing and learning collectively.
If you just want to dive headlong into it yourself, please click on the link below.
Explore the What is ResearchOps Model
When you’re in Kumu: At the top of the page is the name of the map. Towards the middle, you can see the map is called ‘WIRO- Workshops Themes’. If you click on that, you can see a few other maps I made as we tried to go from this to the beautiful one page ResearchOps framework that Kate made from the Kumu model.
Essentially, you can see the Kumu model as the research notes, all faithfully put together into something we could see on one page and make sense of. It is deliberately untouched insofar as each note is the note as the researcher themselves wrote it. As I wrote to the organisers at the time, ‘I wasn’t at your workshop, it’s not my data, it’s yours’.
This model is the middle way, the bridge between the framework that Kate has done, and the collective avalanche that was the global response to our question ‘What is ResearchOps’. Even though it’s synthesised and each petal added to a core of a flower that Emma Boulton and I described, it is still each individual voice of all the people who contributed. It is a record of our collective busyness, our skills, something to explore and see- what does ResearchOps look like in my country? In my space? Where are we the same?
I look at it in wonder at all the things we do every day, that previously we couldn’t adequately describe or make known. In the end, it is my gift to the community, a way to see who they are and what they do.
The ResearchOps Framework is the next step: an opportunity to change the narrative, to build ResearchOps as a profession. It is the birth ResearchOps.
I’m so grateful to have been able to act as a midwife of sorts, alongside all of TeamReops who have given breath and life to this global phenomenon that is ResearchOps. So grateful to have stood amongst these giants in user research, and have found a way to give something back that’s of value, that nourishes this new growth that is ResearchOps.
