Identifying researcher needs in Research Operations

The Home Office Research Operations team, responsible for participant recruitment, equipment provisioning, maintaining a usability lab, and sharing research insights and best practices needed to improve its services for user researchers. Internal feedback suggested inconsistencies in meeting researchers’ needs and highlighted areas such as onboarding and participant recruitment as requiring attention.

To address these challenges, I led the “Research the Researchers” initiative. I began by training the Research Operations team in interview techniques and guiding them to conduct interviews with user researchers across the Home Office. These interviews focused on understanding workflows, challenges, and interactions with Research Operations. The team collaboratively analyzed findings, identified user needs, and co-created a roadmap for service improvements.

We delivered immediate enhancements to onboarding, creating a comprehensive set of resources and guidance for new researchers. Additionally, the research validated the need for an expanded participant recruitment function, which led to the hiring of a recruitment specialist. We also initiated further research into the development of a digital research repository, specifying job requirements for a digital librarian to develop and maintain it, ensuring it would meet the diverse needs of researchers and other research consumers across the organization.

The project fostered a shared purpose within the Research Operations team, strengthened alignment with user needs, and delivered actionable improvements. These changes laid the groundwork for long-term, user-driven service enhancements, setting higher standards for Research Operations within the Home Office.

For more information, read this blog post: Getting meta in Research Operations: researching researchers - Home Office Digital, Data and Technology