How Research Ops can make or break critical partnerships
Research Operations (ResearchOps) can play a central role in enhancing team performance through streamlined processes and in shaping the quality of critical partnerships. Managers and Ops professionals often dive deep into refining workflows, organizing data, and implementing improvements, but relationship-building sometimes takes a back seat.
However, these relationships can define the success or failure of Research and Ops initiatives. Neglecting the cultivation of strong, supportive connections can lead to operational inefficiencies, exacerbate tensions, and fortify organizational silos. Without a strong foundation of support from key stakeholders, your team ambitions may fall short, and your efforts may actually undermine the effectiveness of the teams you serve.
If you’re tasked with defining processes and ways of working for teams, my hope is that this article will outline some basics of relationship-building, and how nurturing these connections can help Research and ResearchOps achieve their goals.
Bridging perspectives and harnessing diverse viewpoints
Whether you’re creating a new Research Operations team, or an individual starting in a new organization, your first step should always be to start by understanding the who, how, and why behind team dynamics and the organizational landscape. This is not only an efficient way to make sure your focus is in the correct place, it’s also about laying the groundwork for robust relationships with stakeholders.
Building these relationships is essential for tackling the correct challenges and securing support for process enhancements. Remember: the goal is to refine efforts in a way that fortifies team cohesion and operational effectiveness. A disconnect between proposed processes and the team’s real needs can weaken trust and undermine the effectiveness of any changes.
How to do this:
Stakeholder mapping
Identify the leaders and stakeholders that you already know are important to the success of your initiatives. This could be your direct manager, product or initiative managers, or even your team peers. Talk to them about who might benefit or be affected by the work that you’re doing, how they are connected to your team, and their place in the organizational hierarchy. Creating a diagram with their name, title, and a brief description of their role or team can help you to better keep track of and understand your environment.
Understanding stakeholder goals and challenges
Each stakeholder’s individual viewpoint will add depth to your overall understanding of your organizational environment and the challenges and needs before you. This requires you as an Ops professional to mediate and meld diverse opinions into coherent strategies while simultaneously cultivating relationships that facilitate open dialogue and mutual respect.
It is important to immerse yourself in each perspective to uncover essential needs and avenues for substantial impact, all while building trust and understanding. Utilizing your research skills allows you to interpret both expressed and hidden needs, and prioritize how you effectively reconcile varying viewpoints into meaningful changes and progress.
Forging relationships to navigate operational challenges
Once you identify the right people to include, you will need to decide how to maintain those lines of communication. How you choose to cultivate these relationships is a nuanced process that depends on your environment. Fostering understanding, collaboration, trust, and a respectful environment are primary goals. Below are some approaches you could take to lay your foundation:
How to do this
Regular stakeholder meetings
Having a regular meeting cadence with those affected and adjacent to your processes can foster open communication, ensure alignment, and build trust. Well designed and run meetings can open lines of communication and ensure ongoing dialogue to help you understand needs, expectations, and concerns. This will also help you anticipate challenges and address them proactively.
These meetings could take the format of regular one-on-ones or they could be cadenced meetings with multiple stakeholders who share an aligned goal (a product or initiative team, etc). My experience suggests that this will depend on the person, your work with them, and how collaborative they want to be with you. Sometimes having a group meeting is best if you have quiet stakeholders without much to discuss; aligning with multiple people at once and allowing all of them to hear each other’s viewpoints can be more efficient.
I keep an individual notes file for each cadenced meeting I have, with the date for each meeting as a headline and then notes about what we covered. I tend to keep all my notes for each meeting in a single file so I can always easily refer back to the meeting history for one person or group easily. This also helps me track the progression of topics and action items with one particular group over a period of time.
Co-design sessions with teams
Co-design sessions bring diverse perspectives together, and can lead to more effective and inventive solutions to operational challenges. These sessions are opportunities to work more closely with teammates and stakeholders towards a common goal, building camaraderie and trust. Transparently involving those affected in the design of processes ensures that the end solutions are more closely aligned with their needs. This promotes a sense of ownership from the team, making them more likely to support the work overall.
These meetings can be informal working sessions or more formal workshops, but in either case I find that the best outcomes come from careful planning, even for something relatively informal. People often want to participate in meetings like these, but it can be difficult to make them successful. If you set up a session like this, you will need to take ownership of the meeting agenda and communicate clear background and context, the input you want from the group, and what you want the overall outcome to be.
Structured feedback loops
Feedback loops ensure that there is a mechanism for continuous evaluation and improvement of processes and tools. This shows stakeholders and team members that their opinions are valued. When team members see that their feedback leads to tangible changes, they are more likely to engage actively and support the process. This fosters a collaborative culture where everyone feels they have a stake in the success of research activities and processes.
As with co-design sessions, depending on the size and structure of your organization, these can be conducted in a variety of ways. They could be conducted via slack messages, emails, or even one-on-one meetings asking one to two basic feedback questions. With a larger group, you may conduct a retrospective or post-mortem that brings people together to align on feedback. This might also be a more formal survey built in the tool of your choosing and sent out to a variety of stakeholders and team members. Your mode of collecting feedback should align well to the type of feedback you need, the resources and time you have available to conduct it, and the speed by which you need it in order to act.
Maximizing impact for research and ops
By fostering an environment where trust, collaboration, and mutual respect thrive, Ops professionals can ensure their initiatives are not just supported but championed by key partners. This approach to relationship-building elevates ResearchOps from a support function to a strategic asset, essential for achieving shared success.
ResearchOps plays a key role in shaping the quality of critical partnerships. By emphasizing the importance of relationship-building, ResearchOps professionals can significantly influence the trajectory of their organization’s research effectiveness and, by extension, its overall strategic direction.
Melissa is a Chicago-based Lead UX researcher and strategist helping teams make impactful decisions for product experiences. Find her in the Research Ops Slack community and on Linkedin.
