Conducting action research

Conducting action research was a process that lasted for a total of 5 months during July 2012 to December 2012. During this time, Data Rangers Oy was able to develop a

Data gathering Data reduction Data display by key

themes

Finding patterns and

links between themes Conclusion drawing

Iteration

portfolio of new services with the help of the researcher. The process itself was highly iterative and the theories and knowledge on the matter were constantly tested in practice. However, four main phases could be pointed out, namely strategic planning, search for concepts, concept development, and full launch.

The role of the researcher in each phase varied, but maintained significant throughout the process. As such, each phase had similar activities that were used to manage and control the phase itself. In most cases, the actual tasks and activities were workshops, formal meetings, telephone meetings, videoconferences and the daily interaction with e-mails and face-to-face conversations. These varied in terms of time, people involved, and outputs required. From each activity, a set of key points were written down and when seen as useful, shared with the service development team. This new service development team was the steering committee of the new service development project and all of its phases, usually contributing to each activity in every way possible. The team consisted of five employees, the CEO, principal consultant, senior consultant, sales manager and business development consultant (i.e. the researcher).

The team was responsible for conducting the aforementioned new service development process during fall 2012. Within this time, customers were consulted and the ideas were tested in real-life environments, but customers were not present in the development activities as such. Instead, customers were used as a “testing environment” where ideas and rough concepts were analyzed from the eyes of the beneficiary. To gain an understanding on the activities, actor roles and resources in each phase, table 9 presents the key tasks and events in each phase in a chronological order.

Table 9: Action research phases and activities.

PHASE ACTIVITY TASKS METHODS

Strategic customers and finding a niche that could be a source of competitive advantage.

Aligning the new strategy and the search scope, thus creating boundaries of

Searching for a rapid, iterative way of conducting concept development Iteration After analyzing results, iterating back to

hypothesis driven development

Analysis workshops

Full launch Formal pilots Conducting first pilot with new customer Pilot service delivery, analysis workshop after delivery Market launch Going public with new service portfolio Formal meeting

As seen in table 9, the activities and tasks varied within each phase. Some included customer participation and some were more informal than others. However, most activities are indeed conversations and meetings and thus the social interaction between clients, and especially within the service development team. All of these activities and their outputs, as well as all of the notes written down are parts of the dataset used in this research. None of the meetings and conversations was transcribed word-to-word, but a summary of notes and key insights was done whenever possible. In addition, most of the key points were shared within the company through documents and e-mails, so the dataset itself is relatively large. This caused some problems for data analysis that required a different approach than in the interview phase.

The aim for data analysis in action research is the same as in interviews that is to make sense of the data, and ultimately becoming immersed in it (Elo & Kyngäs 2007, p. 109).

Similarly, the phases of description, classification and combination (Dey 1993, p. 32) are also used, but they appear on a specific part of the action research process. Whereas data analysis for interviews simply follows these steps, action research starts with a framework of ideas and methodology (i.e. theoretical background), uses these in the area of application and then, based on observations and reflection, analyzes the data (e.g. written notes, observations, critical reflections) in the same fashion as in any qualitative data analysis process (see e.g. Checkland 1991; Merton & Kendall 1964 for action research methodology). Most notably, data analysis in action research is done in the reflection and observation phases, where the data is collected and then analyzed in the same fashion as in qualitative research in general.

The data analysis theory for qualitative research was already described in chapter 4.2.2 (see e.g. Bogdan & Biklen 1982; Dey 1993; Ghauri & Grønhaug 2005 for original theories used in this research), and the same methodology is used here. The difference is that the raw data is not transcribed interviews that are structured to some extent, but mainly notes, e-mails, brief analyses and other written material done by the new service development team and the researcher during the project at the company. This does not change the fact that qualitative data analysis can be carried out as it was done in the interview-phase, but synthesizing and searching for valid patterns and inferences was undoubtedly more difficult since the material was more scattered and non-structured.

Nevertheless, valid conclusions and findings could be made, when the material was analyzed from an objective view, and within a particular context (e.g. event, conversation or workshop).