Some artists plan their art by sketching out the elements in pencil or by painting the background before they paint the focal point or main subject of their masterpiece. For the art of creating research projects, we first ensure that we understand the background for why our client wants the research to be conducted before we “sketch out” a plan to follow that will obtain helpful results.
For many of us whose minds work in a very orderly way, we don’t just start planning from scratch; we use reliable templates—such as checklists and timelines. They serve as a reminder of what elements should be included in the research before we begin working on the focal point of our masterpiece, the actionable insights in the Executive Summary.
Below are some tips to refresh your work resources to employ templates, such as project checklists and timelines, to set yourself (and your projects) up for success.
Sketch Out The Elements—Project Alignment/Kick-Off.
As you begin to create your research masterpiece, create a high-level project checklist to review during your project alignment/kick-off meeting.
For multi-phase or multi-method projects like a segmentation, the project checklist that includes a timeline can keep you, your team, and the client on track since these projects often span several months.
Other steps that can help you stay on track during the project alignment meeting:
- Ask the client for their questionnaire template or an example questionnaire from another project. The example questionnaire will help you to write question and answer choices (including scales in the format preferred by your client) to avoid re-work.
- Ask the client for their report template and for example reports. This will show how they like the data reported (Top Box, Top-2 Box, Averages, etc.) and will help to customize reporting to your client’s standards.
- Most of all, remind them of the objectives that you both agreed to when the project was awarded. If those have changed slightly, not a problem! We are agile researchers, and pivoting is in our job description.
The Focal Point—Actionable Insights.
Once you’ve sketched out the research elements and have completed the project tasks, the last step will be to focus on the actionable insights.
As you know, creating the Executive Summary isn’t simply restating facts or re-arranging the facts to look nice. You should be analyzing the data/facts to create insights—uncover something unknown, recognize a pattern, or gain a new perspective—this is where actionable insights are created.
Starting with a template to create an Executive Summary can be very helpful. I personally love using the famous “P&G One-Page Memo” method to summarize insights into a cohesive story for the Executive Summary.
- Whether you’re using the “P&G One-Page Memo” method or simply listing the research objectives and directly answering them with the insights you’ve gathered by examining the study results, utilize a method that works best for you or on a project-by-project basis.
- Once the insights are summarized, refine those insights to then tell a unified story.
Utilizing resources does not diminish the expertise you bring to research. Templates and other resources used to set up projects can be the foundation of our work and free up space in our minds to do the job we were hired to do—analyzing data to provide insightful and actionable results for our clients and provide them with a masterpiece.
TITLE REFERENCE:
We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents. –Bob Ross (Painter)
Author
Stephanie Trevino
Research Director
Stephanie has nearly 15 years of experience in the marketing research field. She is skilled in both qualitative and quantitative research for both consumer and B2B segments. Her experience includes panel and respondent management, project management, data quality assurance, questionnaire design, reporting, and data visualization. Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Texas State University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington.
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