While not everyone is a researcher, it’s extremely important to get people across teams to understand and contribute to the research process. Planning for this will help ensure your research is valued and, more importantly, acted upon.
One distinction to remember is that while it’s important to engage others in the research process, it’s also vital to prevent non-researchers from interfering in and sharing opinions on the research methodology. The methodology, rigor, and research process should be owned by the experts: the researchers and insight professionals. It is their job is to make sure the methodology generates actionable, high-quality, insightful data.
That said, you do want stakeholders involved in developing the research plan, including establishing the goals, timeline, and scope of the research. At Tetra, we use our decision mapping technique to guide this process. We get all stakeholders to collaborate with us on decision mapping, which includes what decisions we are trying to make; which questions, hypotheses, and assumptions we have; and what the available data sources are.
What do to Do After the Research is Completed
When the research team is done conducting the research and analyzing the data, the next step is to share the extracted insights with teams and stakeholders. Developing stakeholder personas can be extremely helpful when determining what and how to share insights.
During this research stage, it’s ideal to give others access to the insights, but not necessarily the raw data. This is where the Tetra platform can be valuable. It allows people to browse by tags and notes in order to dig in and browse by what is interesting to them.
The desired access is going to vary from person to person and from company to company. The more hands-on a person in a certain role is, the more they will want access to the data. On the other hand, those in leadership roles will generally rather see actionable insights. Again, this is where it is important to know your audience and deliver insights based on their personas.
It’s also a good idea to review preliminary findings with those close to the research process at intervals and give them room to contribute their thoughts around the findings.
In the end, researchers must also plan for continued collaboration after the insights are delivered. Stakeholders will ask questions and perhaps ask for revisions. Planning for this feedback will help democratize the research process.
If you need help getting making your entire organization insights-driven , Tetra offers a range of research solutions. Reach out today!
