ResearchOps Community Town Hall

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Dave Hora and Tomomi Sasaki share the story of this community project, key insights from the data, and an introduction to the Framework. Come join a big milestone of what turned into a very big project! We especially look forward to celebrating with everyone who contributed along the way.

Agenda

• Meet & Greet
• Community Update
• Framework Intro
• Q&A

Framework History

• Wanted to map out career growth and skills for Researchers
• Did a bunch of interviews, learned from researchers

Concept/Timeline

• Interviews, benchmarking → Understand & Conceptualize
• Propose idea and refine via ReOps community
• Build out workshops and execute in local communities
• Digest results of the workshops, put insights together, and go public

• 36 workshops worldwide, 70 organizers, 500+ participants
• Timeline

• Fall 2018 - v1

The Framework!

• https://www.researchskills.net/
• Networked collection of technical craft skills, interpersonal skills, and tolls to map progression for Research Practitioners

Craft Skills (the Y axis)

• Fifteen themes that are mapped onto a spectrum of influence
• They create a value chain
• Influence and visibility !== importance

• Even if it’s “invisible”, it’s essential to require them

• Each theme contains a set of skills, each skill fits into a pattern language

• Skills relate to each other in a variety of ways; i.e. a network
• Precursor skills, follow up skills, Human Skills power-ups
• Tells you what you need to do first and what to do next as you work through mastery

• Skills also have a “most important” and “most desired” measures
  

11 core Human skills

• “Soft skills” rebrand
• Don’t actually pertain to a specific craft/technical skill for Research, but they relate to those skills and can amplify your impact
  

Levels of Mastery (X axis)

• Based on the Art and Science of Teaching

• 0-4 scale increasing in understanding/mastery

• Nodes have relationships to each other
• Things move to the right as you progress through your career

• You should revisit this every quarter or so

• Older skills tend to move down the map as well

• Once you’re an expert at it, they become less cumbersome and therefore less visible

3 major zones

• Learning (0-1)

• Work with mentors, be mindful of it, etc

• Practice (1-3)

• Expand your breadth within the skill and master the craft

• Consolidation (3+)

• Coach/train, write guides, build templates, hand it off to others, etc

• Based on Simon Wardley’s Wardley Mapping

• How technological improvements develop and how to identify new opportunities

Tools

• 1:1 walkthrough to bring you and your team through the mapping exercise

Insights

• Raw data from the workshops is also available, including summaries, raw data, and some analysez
• Link to Github with all of the source materials, templates, workshop materials, etc
• 3 milestones

• Roughly jr, mid, sr
• “Getting started”

• ~1-3 years
• Good enough at coordination & data management as well as evaluative testing
• Growing on interview planning & execution
• Practicing Debrief & Analysis

• “Capable”

• ~4-6 years
• Growing stakeholder engagement
• Practicing Synthesis
• Consolidating planning & execution

• “Thriving”

• ~7-10 years
• Growing Integration into Service Delivery
• Practicing Framing the Work
• Consolidating Survey & Questionnaires (along with others)

• Looking at your skills and the supporting/boosting skills will help you figure out how to move yourself forward
• This also allows you to map out your career trajectory

What’s next?

• Take a breather
• Then, continue building

Continue building the Framework and website

• Fill out the patterns
• Add profiles, reports, and links
• Add stories about how this is being used E.g. UKDS ran an internal workshop on developing their team

Phase 2: From individuals to teams

• Team profiling kit

• Building a profile of the entire team
• Map weaknesses, strengths, where to grow, where to invest

Running a session at User Research London - June 26th

• Get in touch for a discount code

In the wild!

• Share your maps on social as well as #skills-framework
• Online sessions to start discussing, sharing maps, workshopping, etc
• Watch one of the mapping talks, as he has a way to overlay maps on top of each other in a team context

Q&A

How to get involved?

• We have google docs, an editing process, a spreadsheet, etc
• Start with getting in touch with Tomomi, Dave, the #skills-framework channel, or any board member

Is there a style guide available in our preferred analytics tool?

• Python code is out there but there isn’t really an established style guide

How do we make sure this gets rolled out/in front of people?

• No real plan
• Online sessions, conferences, groundswell via this community
• Talks will be available online

• Share it with your cohort if you organized an event!

How do you derive links between core skills and human skills? How to apply them to career development conversations?

• Actor Layers model
• It became clear that some skills help you bridge certain gaps, and then it became fairly clear which craft skills have impacts to the different layers
• We talk a lot about our Craft skills but probably less so about the Human skills

• Have frank/real conversations that these are real skills and can be worked on
• Identify areas for growth

• Survey data showed people rating themselves fairly high in human skills, but also expressed a challenge in influencing others and having a larger sphere of impact

Best practices on how to run this for our org?

• Use the materials we put together for the workshops
• Otherwise, just walk through the process online with them
• We’re still working on this

Have you come across the maturitymapping.com folx?

• We’ve heard of, yes, and it’s possible there are synergies, but we haven’t really explored it yet
• We’ve had people from other disciplines if they can adapt it to their expertise

• Sure: no reason you can’t swap out the Craft Skills for others in Design, Sales, whatever

What’s the best way to upload and share your map?

• Not yet, but if you’re up for it, yeah that would be great
• Having a public collection would be lovely (even if anonymized)

How do we support people at the top-left of the chart?

• We got some data from those people and we’re working on figuring out what to do next and how to help them
• It’s a bit fuzzy
• Christina has a Medium post: https://medium.com/leading-research/the-story-of-leading-research-c97a91a6eb0a

Does the tool address cross-functional collaboration and coordination?

• Sort of
• As you grow, skills tend to be required

Any thoughts on how to integrate this into a formal HR program? E.g. training, role definitions, career planning, compensation

• Not yet. It’s so new.
• Mapping your own skills is something new and not widely adopted
• Would be great to see it get there

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