Jinfo: Jinfo for managing a research team

Jinfo for managing a research team
Jinfo Blog

14th February 2017

Abstract

Which services provide the most value to your research customers? Which offer the most strategic input to the business? Jinfo's director of research, Robin Neidorf, looks at the key markers against which to evaluate your services.

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What should we stop doing?

This is one of the hardest questions for research teams to answer. Everything matters, to the person who is asking for help. And information professionals are genetically predisposed to saying "yes" - it's just the way we're made.

But most research teams can benefit from a detailed analysis of when and how they say yes, and at the same time create meaningful criteria for saying "no".

Analysing research services

In the handful of weeks since the beginning of 2017, I've already delivered four workshops. These relate to research service analysis for different customers in sciences, banking, professional services and government. In each case, we started the discussion with an exercise designed to help the team focus on the highest value, most strategic services with the greatest tangible impact on the business.

Then, we examined the full range of services on offer and evaluated:

Does this service support our highest, most strategic value to the business?

Can we measure the impact of this service on business results?

Do the right stakeholders within the business know we offer this service and what its impact is?

If "no" on the above, does the marketing or goodwill benefit we get from delivering this service outweigh these negatives?

Developing clarity on the services offered

Our answers to these questions enabled us to flag services for closer analysis: how the service is marketed internally, delivered and captured in reporting needs to be adjusted so that we can answer in the affirmative... or perhaps this is a service that can be ended.

This process is neither quick nor easy, but the result is a much more focused research team who knows what they're doing and why, as well as a set of services with clear ROI for the business. Furthermore, it shifts the focus from individual requests to the greater benefits a research team delivers to the business, which raises the importance of team training and development, as well as strategic planning.

Free up the time and create the focus you need for a successful and valued team of researchers. Jinfo Consulting can help.

Recent Subscription content of particular interest to our customers involved with managing teams of researchers:

Articles:

Reports:

Webinars - recordings available to view for anyone with a Jinfo Subscription

How information services can best work with the many stakeholders of data analytics

Upcoming

The Research Focus, "Developing an information-savvy workforce through strategic alignments " runs from April-June 2017 and encompasses three months of research, reports, webinars and Community sessions examining how essential information skills can align with the business and embed throughout departments to ensure a stronger, more capable workforce.

Webinars: