Challenge
The team I was a part of at the time had a particularly hard year. The business was sold to an advertising company and we lost a lot of senior team members who didn’t want to be part of the new vision. With their loss they took with them a lot of historical project knowledge and research knowledge.
As a team we needed to keep our research standards up and maintain the high standards that we set ourselves.
Solution - Research Clinic
As a result of the above Brenden Palmer and I got together and came up with the idea of setting up a Research clinic.
A space to collaborate on research projects and problems that the team are working on in the form of a 45 minute session every 2 weeks on a Friday afternoon.
We began planning a backlog of topics as well as other tasks that would need to be done. Everything from setting up the slack channel, session format, generating interest and setting up meeting invites. We contained this in a figjam.
Part 1 ⛑ would be the clinic for team members to bring their research ‘patients’ AKA problems that they are working on that they would like a second pair of eyes on. This space was a place to collaborate on projects, pitches or internal research challenges.
Part 2 ⚡️ was a space to go through one of our projects that we have worked on in the past that we would like to showcase and for people to ask questions about it. Also a space to do lightning talks on research topics to share expertise and practice our public speaking.
Documenting Value
Like any new internal initiative they can often fade very quickly. So to combat this very early on I decided to document each session in a simple Figjam to demonstrate the value that each session. It listed what we talked about/ did in each part of the clinic. Is also a place for people to reference previous topics they want to revisit, ask questions of the people that worked on them and to show the impact that these sessions were having to the rest of the team to encourage them to join.
The Outcome
Research Clinic has been running for 6 months at the time of me writing this, for me this was the big mile stone, to keep this initiative going for 6 months which would cement it as one of our team sessions. Research has help solve a wide range of challenges on a range of topics like survey writing and feedback, survey analysis, ethnographic research, new business proposals for research lead projects and report feedback. We have also seen a range of lightning talks on research and project walk throughs.
One of our clinics in progress:
Research clinic still continues to this day, after I left the business.