COVID-19 has imposed a different perspective on everyone. Across the world people have been forced to rethink how they approach their everyday lives, their work and everything in between. Busara is no different. Taking Busara online has been an effort between qualitative, quantitative, design and software teams at Busara to expand our research toolbox to meet the needs of the new world.

In the short term, we aim to enable high quality and rigorous remote research implementation that is at the core of the COVID-19 fight. For the longer term we are looking to develop an experimental and non-experimental toolbox that is driven by efficiency, usability and innovation.

Needless to say, an undertaking of this nature has called on us as an organisation to collaborate in new ways both within and between teams. This has led to a mix of new perspectives on how we approach projects and each other. Below are some insights from our qualitative, quantitative, and software teams on collaborating within their own divisions and across teams.

From the Software Team
[Simon Muthusi] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about your own team?

As a software development team, collaborating and working remotely meant that we needed to approach projects with extra rigor and agility. In absence of physical meetings we’ve switched to complete use of online tools to manage tasks, progress and express ideas. Frequent or even extended online calls and use of collaborative sketch tools has helped in achieving similar effect as whiteboard meetings. Taking Busara online has ensured we deliver a working solution for our customers while allowing dynamic requirements. Using project and task management tools such as IRA, Trello, software collaboration & versioning e.g. GIT, online standups, grooming, retrospectives, etc has been key in keeping the team focused and tracking projects.

[Simon] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about another division/team?

Being on the same page about everything is key to the success of any digital product. Working with teams with different backgrounds means that everyone needs to be on the same page about what product success means, what the vision is, what the right approaches are, what to prioritize, how to communicate and more. Creating a roadmap for all our products, holding brainstorms and frequent on-call meetings has been key to bridging the gaps between different stakeholders.

From the Qualitative and Design Team

[Prithika Mohan] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about your own team?

The tools that we utilize in Qual / Design have formerly relied on in-person engagement. The team has become increasingly flexible and adaptive, developing new ways of finding and hearing voices of people who we create solutions for, as well creating tools that synthesize systems for gathering data remotely. The agility and swiftness of the team has enabled us to experiment & develop new tools. An example would be how we’ve adapted Photovoice remotely through asynchronous and synchronous interactions with remote FGDs, through utilizing WhatsApp.

[Prithika] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about another division/team?

Through my experience with project management, I’ve found that it is essential to tackle problems from an interdisciplinary approach. It is important to engage members of other teams to provide additional perspectives to create solutions to multi-layered problems. We established a “Ways of Working” framework at the beginning for equitable buy-in and an understanding of communication styles/preferences — fostering collaborative working relationships and mutual accountability. Relying on other people’s expertise from their fields allows us to access solutions that are specialized and more effective. Operating as one team breaks down silos, and creates a feeling of joint accountability.

From the Experiments and Quantitative Research Team

[Irene Ngina] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about your own team?

The lab has mostly relied on in-person data collection methods such as face to face surveys and lab experiments for the past 5 years . It has been extremely interesting to see our team adapt and innovate during this pandemic by testing and implementing new ways of collecting data remotely e.g. use of online oTree links, phone surveys without compromising data quality.

The adaptive nature of the lab team was clearly depicted on one of the brainstorm sessions, where the icebreaker came with mandatory enabling of video on zoom. The dressing style has since switched from ‘being in the meeting rooms’ to ‘attending meetings from home rooms’.

In the absence of physical reach through in person meetings and simply walking to a colleague’s desk for clarification, granular work plans and regular check ins have been extremely useful in increasing the efficiency of our collaboration.

[Irene] — What is the one thing you’ve learnt about another division/team?

We’ve learned a lot about how we collaborate between divisions while trying to deliver this initiative. Developers on the data team work best with their internal work plans, for example. Even in the presence of a shared work plan they will split off and formulate their own, claiming a unique way of prioritizing taste and the division of labor within their team. Through this work plan they are better positioned to explain why a request can or cannot be fulfilled down to an extremely granular level. They will break it down to the amount of time that will take to develop the idea you have into the product, get you to prioritize what is important, that you have no choice but to be rational. Meanwhile, the qualitative team is very open and enthusiastic about training the larger team on qualitative methods. It has been an intense few weeks of learning at Busara and we can’t wait to see what the future brings.

In the spirit of adapting to a COVID-19 world together, we’ll continue to share with you what we’re developing, where we are failing and most importantly, what we are learning along the way through our online portal here. We’re also looking to hear what you are doing, what has worked and what we should be looking out for. Please feel free to reach out to us by sending an email to [email protected] with the subject line ‘COVID RESPONSE.’

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