3 Ways To Ensure That Agile Programs Drive Outstanding Insight Generation
By Ged Parton, Chief Executive Officer | February 18, 2021
Agile research is too often seen as the low cost, low quality alternative to “proper” research projects. It shouldn’t be this way: with the right objectives and capabilities an agile program can deliver to the standards of the most demanding Insight Professional.
The increasing need to work efficiently and effectively with tightening budget and resource means that Agile research tools and platforms have become a staple of any good research toolkit. Well-executed Agile research delivers insights at the speed of business. To meet the highest standards and have speed the software platform used must have the right capabilities.
Agile research must deliver at speed
The ability to quickly and easily use image and video-based questions in multiple formats through pre-structured questions is key to design and field a meaningful study fast. Maru Agile survey authoring combines a comprehensive pre-defined set of question types with an easy-to-use user interface to ensure the user is quickly and efficiently in field with a survey that is capable of some complexity in routing and question type. The platform is widely used across our client base including by world-leading clients such as a healthcare conglomerate using it for their all-conquering analgesics OTC brand.
How to ensure that Agile research produces credible results
Of course, speed of design and execution is worthless if the results from a survey are untrustworthy or lacking in credibility. The best agile research tool is focused on data quality.
We’ve witnessed a surge of agile insights platforms in recent years, most of which have been designed and built by technology companies. Whilst many have embraced the opportunity for technology to improve efficiency and increase the speed of research; some have failed to recognize the importance of robust and reliable data.
With Maru our Agile environment is able to be plugged into three different sample sources to ensure that our client projects and programs always produce the data quality that’s required.
Our Agile environment has low cost “always-on” respondents ready to complete surveys, or if the project demands our clients can plug the Agile engine into sample from our proprietorial panels of known respondents (who have longitudinal history with us). And thirdly, our Agile engine can be deployed using our client’s own customer or member or employee lists. This latter option is an increasing trend amongst our clients interacting with their Agent and member bases.
Agile research can deliver against the rigorous standards of the Professional
Of course, fielding surveys against appropriate respondent sample is only one way that a project is delivered to the highest possible Professional Standards. There are three additional important ways that the Maru platform enables projects to be handled expertly – securely, with maximum visibility and analyzed to optimize insight.
1 Powerful Analytics and Reporting
Too often, agile survey platforms provide users with top-level findings or quick-view dashboards. In a desire to get data quickly to those that need it, platforms have neglected the fundamental need for research in the first place – understanding issues and opportunities deeply and holistically help inform the best decision making.
The Maru Agile engine tackles this challenge. Survey data created with the Agile survey engine is analyzed and reported via the best-in-class Maru Analysis & Reporting environment. This environment is rich with the capabilities used by our Insight Professionals on high complexity projects. For instance, there are in-built modifiers, to create and save filters for use across projects for efficiency. This powerful capability optimizes the insight potential in every project.
2 Definitive Project Management
We find that Agile research platforms are often used beyond just research teams. Maru Agile has clients working in Marketing, Product and HR departments all recognizing the benefits of an agile approach to feedback and data collection.
The Maru Agile environment helps these clients succeed by enabling the storage of all documents relevant to the project and encouraging collaborative research design.
There is a real beauty here for the Enterprise too, in that every project executed in the clients unique install is visible and capable of review along with data from other types of commissioned projects. The Maru software platform provides the Enterprise with complete visibility.
3 Rigorous Security and Compliance
High quality, well managed and executed projects should also be handled against the highest possible Security & Compliance standards. Maru Agile conforms to the toughest global standards. It also has security clearance from blue-chip Enterprise clients in Financial Services, Healthcare and other sectors where data residency and compliance issues are front and center. Unlike some Agile platforms, Maru believes that security issues can and should be managed appropriately whilst still being able to deliver at speed.
Agile is an exciting area. With the Maru platform, agile research can be innovative and robust. It can empower researchers the way it was originally designed to – by streamlining the research project flow whilst maintaining a total robust focus on Professional Standards quality.