Operations Research: Tactically Support & Guide Strategy

RESEARCH

Types

Primary
- Collects new data
Secondary
- Leverages existing data
  - Public sources, free
  - Internal sources, your company’s data
  - Commercial sources, paid

Primary methods

- Offline, face-to-face
  - Survey
  - Focus group
  - Observation
  - Interview
- Online, remote

Common survey tools – not an exhaustive list,

listed in order of “everyday” to “enterprise”

- - - - Google Forms
      - TypeForm
      - Alchemer
      - SurveyMonkey
      - ConfirmIt
      - Qualtrics

Guiding principles

- Start with a problem
- Seek the truth
- Establish a hypothesis
- Ask good questions

Survey design

- Your research objective & brief
  - What knowledge gap are your trying to fill?
  - What was it that triggered the need for this research?
  - How will this data be used?
  - Who will be using the data?
- Define your audience
  - Demographics
  - Attitudes
  - Behaviors
- Design your questionnaire

Processing survey data

- Cleansing
- Analytics

Applications– supporting insights & strategy, not an exhaustive list

- Understanding the customer
  - What encourages their engagement, purchasing, loyalty, promotion
- Understanding your company
  - Your branding, engagement, product design, pricing
- Understanding your competition
  - How their branding, engagement, offerings impact the market

For in-depth explorations into the approach &/or applications of operations research, explore expanded and enhanced content on the ‘Resources‘ pages:

{Note: To ease your experience, pages will be linked here as content is posted.}

- Blogs
- Documentation (FAQs, How To Guides, Case Studies, & Technical References)
- Tutorials
- Tech & Gear