#WhatisResearchOps: we’re in analysis phase and it’s epic!
Why #WhatisResearchOps?
Around 6 months ago, I started the ResearchOps Community Slack with the aim of validating and defining the nascent practice of ResearchOps. I’ve spent more than half a decade researching researchers, delivering research infrastructure, and hearing from researchers about how they’re battling with the weight of the logistics and operations that sit at the base of their job. As in-house teams grow bigger and research skills become more in demand, this story becomes even more true — growth is a great thing, but it comes at a cost, often to the detriment of researchers both personally and professionally.
(If you’re asking yourself “Um, what the hell is #WhatisResearchOps, even?”, read here.)
The power of team
Without rehashing a story shared elsewhere, a team of very smart people from around the world gathered and we had a fabulous idea: we’d develop a workshop template that could be used by each of us to explore what the researchers in our locale found most challenging and rewarding in their jobs. This would be a global research project about us and for us. The data we gleaned from these workshops would help us collectively define #WhatisResearchOps and, in the process, we’d validate it as a role. Our aim was to run five workshops across the world.
Six months later, and the team of workshop organisers now sits at around 50. Workshops have taken place in 32 cities including Japan, Russia (due in September), South Africa, India and more. We also ran a survey that received hundreds of responses. It goes without saying that the amount of data we now have is significant, and the job of processing it all has become much more significant too. We’ve got some analysing to do! The power of team to the rescue.
We’re doing a data analysis with 32 data sets and 50 global contributors
Not that I’m saying vast research projects have never been done — of course they have — but none of the 50 organisers/researchers who are involved in this initiative have done something quite like this before. So we’re making it up as we go along. As usual.
Here’s how we’re doing things:
- Each workshop organiser (or team of organisers) is analysing their own workshop data and developing their own cards and insights. They’ll use their own taxonomy to maintain local understanding and context.
- With the cities processed, each region lead will coordinate an affinity sort of all the cities that took part in their region. This will gives us per region insights e.g. Australasia is a region.
- TeamReOps (the original core team) and any keen organisers will do a sort of all the regional data resulting in global insights about ResearchOps. We’ll include the survey data to see where it contrasts/compares and where it adds detail to the bigger picture.
- We’ll keep doing calls with everyone involved to make sure we’re not losing the original meaning of things in sifting.
Emma Boulton and Brigette Metzler have been working on our survey data. They’ve put hours of time into that effort and now have a small team gathered to help them.
We’re using Aurelius, a research analysis tool, to help make our project more manageable. Zack Naylor of Aurelius, an avid Community member and contributor, has kindly offered us free access for at least a year.
So then what?
Out of this data, we’ll develop a few things:
- A presentation deck about what we learned. Any one of the organisers can use this deck to present the research findings.
- A framework that shares, according to our research and experience, what ResearchOps is. It’s inevitable that this framework will grow and change over time as the practice develops.
- A job description that companies can use to hire someone to do ResearchOps; this is something I get asked for all the time and it’s very important — people are being hired with all sorts of skewed expectations as to what they can deliver and with what resources. Passing on the pain of a team of researchers to one person is not a solution.
When you can expect to see some #WhatisResearchOps results
We’re aiming to have the deck and assets ready by mid October. They’ll be open-source and shared globally, available for anyone to use under a Wikimedia Commons license. Our organisers can use the data we’ve collected to make anything they think will be useful. Only one encouragement applies, anything made should be made open-source too. Everything we do is by the Community for the wider community, whether you’re in the Slack or not.
Progress over perfection
This is as much a community and practice building venture as it is a research project. As a result, the organisers have agreed to an ethos of progress over perfection; we’re aiming for good enough. After all, what we’ve have achieved in 6 months is pretty epic, and doing our best on top of epic must be good enough.
