Editor’s note: Simon Guy is cofounder and CEO of DataChefs, Davos, Switzerland. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared here under the title, “You’re still using what?!?”
When we hear about research innovation, it’s often in the context of shiny new tools that offer new ways to connect with respondents or research subjects – passive data collection, social media listening, emotion recognition, niche targeting and so forth. Or, it can be in terms of turning data into recommendations and business actions – data mining, econometric models, automated statistical analyses, storytelling and the like.
But there’s another wave of innovation which sits at the project coalface and needs no more than a change in mind-set to deliver drastic efficiencies and improvements to how you get stuff done. It draws upon the work of very smart people in sectors unrelated to MR. It’s free (or low cost) and will make you a research superhero.
Heard of any of these? You’re already halfway there.
Slack, Asana, Trello, Zapier, Moxtra. Do you recognize the names or what they do? Have you tried them out or do you know anyone who uses them? Mobile communications, and the sheer processing power that lives within your smartphone or tablet, have given rise to a new generation of tools that are changing how people talk to each other, organize work and share information. This is happening across all industries, from start-ups to mega-corps. Are researchers slow to catch on?
Think about your typical project – chances are that e-mail sits at the heart of the communication process. That’s convenient on one level (everyone has an e-mail address) but, being honest, isn’t there a better way?
Are you frustrated by:
- e-mail streams going off on tangents;
- having to repeatedly download each document update;
- spending an inordinate amount of time just searching for that important message (let alone doing anything about it);
- wondering why no one has responded; and
- managing a burgeoning inbox?
There are simple solutions to free you from this misery.
You’ve likely heard of Slack – it’s one of those rare unicorn start-ups. Founded less than two years ago, it’s already valued at $2.8 billion, has $25 million in annual recurring revenue and 1.2 million daily users. What does it do? At its core, it’s a messaging app allowing internal and external contacts to communicate without e-mail. And most of its functionality is free (yes, free).
Asana and Trello are different takes on project management. Create stages, populate them with timings and tasks, invite team members to the project, communicate directly, move the project through the stages.
We use Moxtra – with project-specific chat, document storage, to-dos and video/audio meetings (just like Skype) it’s a great fit with our business. We can manage the whole project process without sending a single e-mail.
Zapier connects apps to each other. This is APIs for the masses – an action in Slack, for example, triggers another action in Trello (or vice versa). No coding experience required – just natural curiosity and a desire to free yourself from important but monotonous tasks.
These are just some of the apps and platforms which can help you out. For a more comprehensive list, explore Zapier to see what’s out there. Oh, and this post was written using Quip – another game-changing tool which has made Word and xls redundant in our office.
What’s the common link? Online communication. I said earlier that everyone has an e-mail. Nowadays everyone has a smartphone, and that means anyone involved in a project can download an app which works round the clock. Set your notifications and you’re instantly alerted to updates and queries wherever you are. That’s not to say you need to be running your projects on your phone – far from it, all offer browser-based access which syncs with your mobile app. It just means that when you’re away from the computer, you don’t have to be away from the project.
Collaboration
These are tools to improve project collaboration. Collaboration means working in a distinct way, and this is where we may lose a few of you. To get the best out of these tools, you need a degree of transparency in what’s going on, and to give all project members the opportunity to communicate with each other. For example, a survey scripter thinks a question could be reworked to make it easier for a respondent to answer. Do they ask their project manager to raise it with the client or go direct to the client? Which is more likely to result in a quicker resolution and reinforce a collaborative culture?
We all have partners in a project – whether they be clients, suppliers or our own team – that communicate freely with each other. It demonstrates transparency, speeds up decision-making, underlines personal responsibility and reinforces a partnership approach (everyone pulling in the same direction to achieve a common aim).
Isn’t that dangerous? Only if you’re trying to ring-fence knowledge – but if you’re doing that, you’re not working in partnership; you don’t see the other collaborators as partners but as traditional clients and suppliers who should be kept at arms-length from each other.
Company culture therefore plays an important role here. Broadly speaking, the bigger the organization, the more IT compliance controls are in place, the greater the barriers to test and implement new collaborative platforms in day-to-day work.
At the other end of the scale, smaller agencies are nimble, and have greater opportunities to rapidly incorporate new ways of working but some may feel outside their comfort-zone to test the waters. We celebrate innovation in so many research areas, so isn’t it time we shine a light inside our own businesses? Shouldn’t we be challenging current practices with the same vigor that we apply to a sample plan?
Is e-mail so bad?
It all depends on what you’re using it for. In many cases it’s the default for all kinds of business communication but we think it is a bad fit for project management on a whole load of levels. Here’s one example: there are six people in your project stream, plus a couple of catch-all team e-mail addresses for coverage. You e-mail everyone a spreadsheet with demographic quota targets. Then (such is life) you have to resend a couple of days later with new amends. There are now at least 16 copies of the quota spreadsheet flying around (maybe many more, depending on the members of those team e-mail addresses) – and half of those copies are out of date. Compare that to uploading the spreadsheet to a collaboration platform, and then updating it with the changes. There’s only one version available. Which scenario is more likely to introduce miscommunication and error when the time comes to applying those targets?
Or consider when a project handover is needed, such as for vacation cover. How do you distil all those e-mails and attachments into a coherent chronology? Where are the objectives, timings and next actions? Now let’s assume you’re handing over five projects. How long is that going to take?
But what if everything was available as an ongoing conversation, if all the documentation was in one place, if the to-dos were listed and ticked off and everyone had the same information available? How long would it take you now?
Back to the future
One thing is clear: we can learn a lot from other sectors. We may be the experts at designing a research project but, with the odd exception, project communication needs some serious updating. Why is that? Partly, I think, because the research industry is traditionally fragmented – individual systems and platforms are silos that find it very hard to talk to each other. Meaningful collaboration hasn’t happened to any great degree because, until recently, it couldn’t.
Maybe change is just deemed too risky (but don’t tell that to the NASA JPL scientists who are using Slack while putting robots on Mars). Or perhaps we’re not yet in a position to truly consider project collaborators as partners. Whatever the root causes, think on this: The easier you make it for people to work with you, the more they’ll enjoy it and the more likely they’ll come back for more.
Let’s face it. Research can be an incredibly rewarding career. Can’t it also be fun?