The need for agile research

A shift in responsibility

Lucas Hulsebos – CEO easy2survey

A lot of companies have introduced agile working these past few years. Agile working relates to aspects of time and place flexibility, but also involves doing work differently by focusing on performance and outcomes. Agile working also requires other ways of doing market research. Market research needs to be done quicker and with more flexibility. Especially when companies work in short sprints, the need for quick research becomes more prominent.

The shift in responsibility

Companies that implemented a more agile way of working have introduced a different role for the Insights Team. The Insights Team is no longer separated from the other departments, but fully integrated in the agile team. But with this development, comes a big risk: the shift in responsibility. This is summarised in the figure below.

The sacrifice of quality

Agile working means an increase in a need for speed. A lot of market research agencies don’t know how to deal with that and shift the responsibility to the client. Instead of developing a sound and valid methodology, they rely on the client and say: “if you develop your own study, we make sure that it’s done fast”. Nowadays flexibility is described as letting the client do it themselves. This is where quality gets left out. The Insights Team is no longer around to manage the quality.

If the trade-off is between quality and speed, we often see quality being sacrificed in agile work processes. The research is done fast, but the quality is poor. The biggest problem is the questionnaire. A good questionnaire is not a research objective translated into a question on a 5-point scale. Good research is built up holistically and integrates different techniques to get a full understanding. In order to do this properly you need knowledge and experience and sometimes time. Time that needs to come from either the client or the research agency.

Important learnings towards agile working

Based on our experience with working with different “agile” organisations, we have created a list of important learnings how research should facilitate these agile working processes:

• Never sacrifice quality for speed. If you aren’t able to do research right, you are better of relying on gut feeling and experience.
• Create an automated brief that everyone can use in the organisation when dealing with a certain issue. Make sure that the metrics and methodology are set before filling in this brief.
• Make sure the brief is simple and straightforward. Keep in mind that it will be filled in by nonprofessional’s in the field of market research.
• Create a high standard solution using holistic principles of market research. Keep in mind that this can only be applied to certain research questions, and not for everything.
• Make sure that the report only shows the most important KPI’s. Research needs to support a decision and should never create confusion.

Shifting towards the client

If these requirements are met, research can support agile working much better than it currently is. In fact, agile is more than working in a different way, it is being and behaving differently and doing things differently. And if done right, the knowledge and time effort continue to be the responsibility of the research agency. For it should never be shifted towards the client.