3 Minutes 
You’ve successfully implemented agile research at your organization – congratulations!
You already know agility is a way of operating, not a one-and-done solution. As your organization changes and grows, your process likely will too. That is, after all, the whole idea behind your agile transformation: making changes based on regular feedback.
This requires continuous monitoring and optimization, which doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply ask yourself the following questions regularly:
- Is the onboarding process effective for me and my team to move toward agile research?
- What else can agile research technology do for me within my current role or department?
- Has agile research made me and my team more efficient?
- How have the teams I support adopted our new solutions?
Note your answers and track them over time. As you witness change, review your current process to determine how it might be changed to continue to meet your needs.
- Are you getting requests for new kinds of projects that weren’t previously conducted?
- Has the number of projects conducted with your research technology suddenly dropped?
- Have most team members stopped following the standardized procedures?
All of these indicate your agile research process needs to be amended to better suit your team’s current state.
If, on the other hand, you find your answers remain fairly consistent, it might be an opportunity to expand the agile research process to a larger user base. Identify other team members or departments that have expressed a desire for more regular access to consumer feedback. Rather than having their requests increase the workload on the existing agile research team, empower them to conduct this research on their own.
This might seem scary at first, but depending on your research technology, you can give these inexperienced users access to templates created by the core research team. By setting up the questions and even sample parameters for different kinds of projects, new users can do their own research, uncover insights for themselves, and support their own decisions with reliable data.
Streamline reporting so team members know how to use the research to make good decisions. Run a brief training session on what all of the reporting features in your research technology mean and do. It may also be helpful to establish guidelines on reporting to ensure consistency.
Regardless of whether your agile research process works smoothly or needs adjustments, continue to develop and track the key performance indicators you set when you sought leadership buy-in. These will guide your long-term decisions and allow you to quantify your successes.
Finally, when you request research or deliver insights derived from it, take a moment to consider if the process was as seamless as it could be. If not, conduct a retrospective to investigate opportunities to streamline how you work to maintain your agility. There will always be room to optimize and improve.
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