Research Operations Sourcebook

Tactical research solves immediate delivery questions. It is narrow, fast and context-specific.

Guidance:

• prioritise operational needs
• minimise artefacts
• optimise speed and clarity

Tactical work is effective when it unblocks decisions without attempting to be strategic.

Strategic research focuses on long-term vision, cross-service impact and underlying user needs.

It requires greater depth, mixed methods and synthesis across multiple data sources. Outputs may include insight frameworks, opportunity maps and service-level risk registers.

Establishing a strategic plan for user research ensures that research activities are not just reactive, but proactively aligned with the organisation's long-term objectives.

• Create a research roadmap that links research initiatives to business goals over the next 6 to 12 months.
• Align research planning with product and business planning cycles so research supports key milestones.
• Co-create the research agenda with stakeholders, prioritising questions that unlock strategic decisions.
• Balance exploratory and evaluative work to support both immediate delivery and long-term opportunity finding.
• Review and adjust the plan regularly to respond to changing organisational priorities.

As demand for research grows, a structured programme management approach is required to handle multiple projects efficiently.

• Standardise research requests through an intake form capturing aims, timelines and constraints.
• Maintain a visible research backlog and calendar showing proposed, in-progress and completed work.
• Prioritise projects based on strategic impact, urgency and readiness of teams.
• Coordinate cross-functional resources such as recruitment, tools and specialist support for each study.
• Monitor progress, adjust the pipeline as priorities change and communicate trade-offs transparently.

Providing templates and clear method guidance streamlines studies and supports consistent quality.

• Maintain a central library of templates for plans, screeners, discussion guides, surveys and reports.
• Create concise playbooks for common research methods, with when-to-use guidance and practical steps.
• Embed ethical and legal prompts within templates, including risk considerations and consent requirements.
• Version-control templates, assign ownership and update them based on feedback and emerging practice.
• Onboard new staff to the template library and playbooks as part of research training.

In fast-moving teams, research must integrate with agile delivery without losing rigour.

• Embed research tasks into sprints and planning cycles, not as a separate track.
• Use lean, just-enough studies that can be run and analysed within sprint timescales.
• Maintain a rolling research backlog aligned to product backlogs and release plans.
• Synchronise research milestones with key design and development decisions.
• Favour rapid debriefs and lightweight deliverables that feed directly into the next iteration.

When research uncovers insights affecting multiple teams or services, document these early.

This enables coordinated decision-making and prevents duplicated effort. Cross-service implications often reveal hidden policy impacts or operational dependencies.