ROC2023 Preview: Let’s start talking about ResearchOps as a craft
By Stephanie Marsh, Springer Nature.
Based on the upcoming https://reopsconference.com/ presentation.
I am very excited to have the opportunity to give one of this year’s keynotes at ROC. It has given me the chance to reflect on my career, what skills I have and how we and others view ResearchOps.
In this blog post, I want to talk about ResearchOps as a craft and what that means.
Before I moved into leading a ReOps team at the science publisher Springer Nature, I was the Head of User Research and Analysis at Government Digital Service (GDS) in the UK government. Community was an integral part of the culture and you would often hear people in the User Centered Design communities talking of ‘Design as a craft’ or ‘Research as a craft’. I don’t know as much about DesignOps as I would like, but Holly told me that it’s the same in the DesignOps community.
Maybe I’m not hanging out in the right places, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about ResearchOps as a craft, and I think it’s time to change that. You may be thinking… Why? What is the point in that? Well, let me lay out my thinking around this, and I hope this can become a community discussion.
From my GDS experience, the ‘craft’ discussions were born out of evangelizing and advocating for the skills required to do a particular job. No one questions the skills required to be a developer. You can either code or you can’t, there’s obviously a wide spectrum of capability within that, but coding is a hard core skill, no doubt about it. But if you are a user researcher or a content designer, for example, you will probably have come across the attitude that ‘everyone can talk to people’, ‘everyone can write’. So we need to educate people in the craft, the skills required, because user research is not just chatting to some randoms, and content design is not just throwing some words on a page.
And reflecting on my time being a user researcher myself for many years (going all the way back to 2003), having experienced a wide variety of highs and lows of the work in addition to non-researchers thinking they can do your job. On an obviously basic good day, your research confirms a hypothesis and everyone is very happy about it, they love you. And the lows of being you are seen as a blocker, or a thorn in PMs / Designers / other stakeholders’ side when the insights you deliver are not what they want to hear. You called their kid the ugliest on the block and now they hate you. Or research skeptics not taking your work seriously, ‘it’s not really evidence, is it?’ — all things I was familiar with as a researcher.
I have had a similar experience as an Ops person. Everyone loves you when you are seamlessly enabling research to happen, taking off the burden from the researcher. But then, when you tell them that can’t do something because it’s not GDPR compliant, or recruitment will take longer because we don’t have consent to contact the sales database or the stressed, overworked researcher decides they’ll do the knowledge management side of things later, as it’s not as important as delivering answers to the PO. Then the PM, Designers, Stakeholders and researchers don’t love you so much. And ReOps is still an emerging field, so people don’t really know what ReOps job entails — and they vary from organization to organization depending on what is needed.
We’re often dismissed as ‘just administrators’, Ops is more than administration. But it is very very important to say admin is an important part of Ops work and there is NO shame in having administrative or secretarial jobs. What is shameful is how people with such jobs are still treated, that they are less than people with ‘skilled jobs’.
We all have something to bring to the table, something of value that the team / department / organization needs. That is why you have such a job.
The image below is an excellent representation of how involved the research and ops cycles are.
There seems to be a trend of demand increasing for Ops but Ops budgets are remaining the same, which means we are all doing more with less. And that means likely one or a very small number of Ops people are covering the Ops process, both ResearchOps and KnowledgeOps, to support primary and secondary research — requiring a wide spectrum of specialist skills and knowledge. Administrative skills are also critical for Ops jobs including:
- Organization
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Service provision
- Problem solving
- Time (and budget) management
- Multi-tasking
Yes, these are generally skills that a user researcher needs too, but Ops people are putting these skills to use in parts of the research process that researchers don’t want to do or find it difficult to make the time to do, with everything else they are doing. Each skill can be broken down further, for example, here is one example under each of these umbrella categories;
- Organization:
Organizing and maintaining records, files, and databases. - Communication:
Absorbing and disseminating information in a practical and understandable way. - Collaboration:
The ability to build solid, collaborative relationships with colleagues. - Service provision:
Complaint and problem resolution. - Problem solving:
Come up with creative solutions to problems - Time management:
Providing support when the researcher needs it or providing a way for them to self serve - Multi-tasking:
One of the key things my team is constantly practicing a balancing act. On one hand providing tactical reactive support that is needed to ensure the day to day research activities run as smoothly as possible for each person doing research at the same time within the current processes. On the other hand doing long term strategic work that will improve existing processes and infrastructure or building and implementing new things to improve the experience of doing research for everyone.
Thinking about it now, that’s some kind of multitasking inception — supporting the needs of people at different stages of the research process right now as well as planning and delivering for supporting future research needs.
During my talk I will be reflecting on the transferable skills I used to start my first ResearchOps job, a part of which was establishing the practice and processes of having a ReOps team in the organization for the first time. I’ll also be reflecting on the skills I have learned / am learning whilst doing an Ops job.
So if you want to pivot from Research to Ops, or you want some inspiration for how to demonstrate the complexity of ResearchOps as a practice and professional, well I hope to see you there!
Learn more at the ResearchOps Conference 2023
Stephanie will be expanding on these ideas in their presentation at https://reopsconference.com/ on Thursday, 16 November 2023.
