Are you also headed towards a hockey stick, my fellow market researcher? Not the revenue growth hockey stick your company is chasing, but one of stress related sick leaves as the industry is bordering the limit of what can be done with decreasing or stagnating resources and consumers’ aspirations and desires evolving at an ever-high rate. We need change. Luckily there are low-hanging fruits to harvest.
70% of market research professionals felt stressed in 2021 (The Market Research Society).
It’s 2 people out of a team of 3!
Do I hear you saying, “count me in”?
Is this a sign that a) market researchers work in a more reactive than proactive environment or b) that the industry is reaching the limit of what can be done with decreasing or stagnating resources while consumers’ aspirations and desires are evolving at an ever-high rate?
The level of resources is a real challenge. Increased budgets and more people would surely be a nice solution. But 71% of organizations’ budgets were the same or decreased in 2021 compared to 2020 (ESOMAR), so that is not the way the industry is headed.
At the same time market researchers are facing so many changes:
So, market researchers are overwhelmed by time, budget, and structural constraints in a new reality asking for faster decision-making. Hence, the old “work smarter, not harder” saying is as relevant as ever.
Now, I talk to you every day, I see you striving to meet deadlines, sometimes stretching thin to get the results before this important stakeholder meeting or just in time before the launch of that marketing campaign.
You want to know your market, you need to understand consumers, you will have to make a choice, you will need to select the best option. How do you make the best of what you’ve got?
I find that there is one low-hanging fruit ripe and ready to be harvested that can make a major difference for you: project management.
An email ticks in from your market research provider with a test link for your new survey. You open the link and submit your comments directly in the survey, reply to your provider and move on to your next task. Ten minutes later you are cc’ed on Susan’s email submitting her comments in the email. An hour later you are cc’ed to Henri’s mail asking why the survey has not been set up according to the survey3_final_comments_final.docx that he forwarded yesterday. The market research provider is trying to implement everything before he asks you to test the survey again. That is when you see that Henri snook in edits for two questions that you disapprove of. And that is when you realize these changes should probably be forwarded to Amy who is dealing with your Africa supplier.
Sounds familiar?
I bet you can think of projects where it has been worse.
It’s Pascal’s triangle that is at play here: in a team of 3 there are 9 ways to be invited to a meeting. In a team of 5, there are 75. Transfer that to project communication and you have a whirlwind of interests and opinions. No wonder you struggle to coordinate multiple stakeholders internally and keep external contact persons in the loop!
However, there is both time and complexity to save by taking on project management in your own team and in collaboration with your external market research providers.
Internal first:
First of all, there should be a clear definition of everyone’s role in the project. Both to know and agree on how many people are involved but also to make sure that emails and messages only include the people needed to make a decision on a given topic. This way you stay as high up in Pascal’s triangle as possible and minimize ending in the scenario I sketched out above.
Next, I recommend using a project management framework to run projects, preferably via a tool like Trello, Monday, Asana, or similar. Your projects do have an element of repetition to them, so it is possible to build a project governance model describing the steps you need to take and who has the responsibility/right to sign off.
It takes some time to get used to, but frees up a lot of energy.
Part of that energy you can invest in demanding better project management from your external partner(s):
Running a project with an external market research partner is a big part of your day and you are likely juggling a few external partners at once.
That makes it all the more important that the coordination and communication runs smoothly: having an email thread with a bunch of colleagues cc’ed where an unstructured contact person can quickly run a project off track and cause misunderstandings with unnecessary extra hours to figure things out.
The solution is two-fold: demand a single point of contact and expect your external partner to have a project governance model that will make your project a smooth sailing.
The single point of contact is an obvious reduction of complexity and will in itself simplify the communication (my colleague, Megan Dean, has written more about the advantages of a single point of contact here.).
But it goes both ways: I see companies actually win back time and clarity when they appoint just one point of contact between their organization and us.
The second part is project governance. Here in Opeepl we work with the model illustrated below where every step is described in terms of what should happen and who is responsible. This makes it much easier to run projects with a firm grip on the wheel.
I use the model in practice with a Trello dashboard for the project management that my clients are invited to. That way the process, tasks and responsibilities are easily accessible for everyone in the project group and my clients tell me that they find it very helpful that they always know where we are in the process, who is responsible for the next step, how and where we can help each other move forward towards our target.
It does not take me additional time to run my projects like this. It frees up time: for a recent concept test that took one week to run end-to-end my client was 25% more efficient with their team time while using this setup together with us. It’s one day in a project week for the first timers!
The outcome is an instant win in terms of reducing project complexity and releasing more energy for the innovation process.
That means more time to be creative, more time to share data, crazy findings, and new ideas. Maybe even being less afraid of making mistakes? And definitely more energy for operationalizing the market research insights into business actions.
In short, less stress. More clarity.
