Agility in Action – How to deliver quality research in half the time

COVID-19 has reminded us how important it is to be able to adapt ourselves to a rapidly changing business environment. Agility is a key element in gaining strategic advantage and market success, both for you as a provider of healthcare products and solutions and for us as your research partner.

‘Agility’ means different things to different people.  One of the reasons that there is confusion around the term is that there are two separate definitions, based on two different perspectives and derivations.

1. Agile, as in responsive, a term that has been used in research for many years.

2. Agile, adopted from the software industry, a modern method of project management, involving concepts like minimum viable product, sprints, and scrums.

In this article, I will look at both definitions and in so doing will suggest practical tips as to how you can deliver quality insights and information to your organisation in less time.

We have also noticed that the discourse on agility tends to focus on technology. This underplays the importance of experience. Knowing what works and what doesn’t work means we can craft questionnaires or discussion guides in less time. It also means we can avoid pitfalls. There is no better way to speed up research than getting it right first time.

So, let’s start by focusing on how we can be more responsive to our organisations by saving time in project management before going on to look at the adoption of agile project management principles.

The time-saving steps that we outline in this article can cut your project time in half, reducing a 20-week study to just 10 weeks.

The time-saving measures that we would recommend include:

1. Focus your objectives - Always take a little more time up front to see which questions can be answered by existing data or other team members.

2. Plan your research to the day – Use a GANTT chart to overlap different steps in the project, having activities occurring simultaneously wherever possible.

3. Co-operate with internal departments – Give finance and pharmacovigilance plenty of notice of when you will need their support and understand exactly how they need to receive information to avoid delays.

4. Use best-practice questions – Work with an agency that uses questionnaire templates or question banks. If you ask questions in a consistent way, this will save time during questionnaire design, translation, programming and data processing.

5. Prepare a report template – Ask your agency to prepare a report template while fieldwork is ongoing. This will allow them to drop the final data into the report template and allows them to focus on unearthing the insights rather than charting the data.

6. Automated charting - Take advantage of automation whenever the scale of the research makes it worthwhile.

7. Availability - Use the right agency and FW partner who can meet your timelines, with experienced Directors who are available and responsive (small agencies tend to be better for this as Directors have more time for projects).

At Purdie Pascoe, we have put all these time-saving approaches together to bring you PACE, a best-in-class qualitative approach that can reduce the time needed for a qual study by as much as 60%, without impacting the quality of the insights.

We do this by:

• Standardising the “mechanics”, using templates as a starting point, before tailoring these to your specific business questions

• Use Director-level moderators who understand your commercial objectives, probe intelligently and can brainstorm the findings with you and your internal stakeholders

• Combine human analysis with machine learning (text analytics and natural language processing) to ensure no nuance is lost, despite the accelerated timeframe

• Keep analysis and reporting within Purdie Pascoe’s experienced team of researchers to avoid insight leakage

• Provide a concise presentation with key business insights and actions together with an impactful infographic to accelerate decision-making

Up to this point, we have talked about how we can combine our experience with technology to deliver quality insights in less time. Now, let’s move on to explore agile project management principles in more detail and how we can adopt these from the software industry into our research programmes.

The two most important cornerstones of agile project management are:

• Iteration – Continuous improvement of design

• Collaboration – Joint problem solving and decision making

Therefore, to adopt agile research principles, it is vital that our projects and teams are also built on these cornerstones. It will only be possible to adopt an iterative approach if your internal stakeholders are willing and able to ‘scrum’ regularly by attending fieldwork, debriefs and planning meetings. Teams also need to be set up for joint decision-making, where all relevant disciplines are represented, and all opinions are important.

The cornerstones of iteration and collaboration will then need to be central to every aspect of your research:

1. Objectives will need to be consolidated into bite-sized chunks that can be addressed quickly and easily before moving on. This will lend the research to ‘sprints’. When deciding how to meet the objectives of the research try to form hypotheses that can be validated or proven wrong.

2. Research approaches – Select ones that can either be done in sprints or have an inherent element of iteration to them, for example:

   a.         Short quant pulses

   b.         Online qual, such as Web-Assisted TDIs or online FGDs

   c.          Chat forums

   d.         Online bulletin boards and Market Research Online Communities (MROCs)

3. Phase the research – We need not conduct all countries at the same time. Consider starting the research off with a small sample in 1 or 2 countries. Learn from these initial interviews before amending concepts and re-testing in subsequent interviews.

4. Deliverables - Plan for deliverables that will engage internal stakeholders and inspire collaboration.

In conclusion, we have looked at agility through two different lenses. We have looked at a number of different tactics we can adopt to ensure that our projects run more smoothly and deliver insights more quickly. We have also explored what it takes to adopt the agile principles of iteration and collaboration.

Either way, it is clear that, to be more agile, we need to do much more than use the latest technology. Technology is important, but they are tools that still require a team of craftsmen. Experience and know-how are also critical if we are to adapt to the needs of our organisations and help drive strategic advantage and market success.

For more information about this article, please contact Stephen Potts, a Director at Purdie Pascoe, at Stephen.Potts@purdiepascoe.com