I am trying to start a service improvement project at my current organization. I have worked on service design projects before, but the scope and formality were not as pronounced. Typically, the projects I took on were already narrow in scope, or they didn't need much external oversight.

This time, the scope is broad. The project focuses on identifying problem areas and potential opportunity spaces across an entire section of a service, so it is also quite open-ended. It also calls for more rigorous qualitative research with the core users of our services. In this case, those are people involved in government-mandated services in the child welfare space.

With all that in mind, I thought: I am an ethical person, my organization is ethical, we care, and we are all up to date on the latest ethics and privacy standards. The consent forms I drew up are solid (adapted from user-research materials used in similar settings), I have guidelines around data collection, and I have strict standards about not asking irrelevant or potentially traumatizing questions.

So I thought I had everything in place and could dive straight into the first phase of the project (discovery) and start capturing insights and building understanding. The plan was to talk to people, do some ethnography, and conduct user interviews. Oh, how wrong I was to assume I could just get up and go.

What I did not anticipate was the complexity and the permission gathering that come with these research methods in child welfare. Nor did I anticipate how an organization's structure, particularly its funding partners, can affect how much leeway you have in what you can and cannot do, even when the goal is to improve your services.

Permission gathering

It took weeks just to figure out who the right person was to contact at the local government about permissions. Now I am waiting on further conversations with the people who can actually make the decisions. I am not opposed to the screening, but the process has shown me how important it is to think about the work as a whole, and about how research (not research with a capital R) fits within it.

What is research in this context?

The research is not an end in itself. It is about capturing and observing enough information to make sound decisions about how I can help my organization provide better services. It is not trying to change the entire child welfare system, or to tell users how they should do things differently in their overall journey. And it is definitely not trying to establish one universal truth to be published in child welfare journals. Even these distinctions came out of this experience; they were not obvious to me as a designer before. It now feels important, to me at least, to be clear about what I am setting out to do and why.

Some questions that have come up for me along the way:

• What is the research, and what does it feed into?
• Is it research with a capital R, or is it project-specific, tied to a service improvement initiative?
• How do you communicate the fluidity of a research process that is embedded in the design process, when people associate research with absolutes?

I will circle back to this. Going to now scroll around the interwebs to find some case studies/resources on this situation.