viv.i.am
Building ResearchOps from the Ground Up
Service
Organizational Transformation, ResearchOps, Service Design
Client
Entel
Agency
Multiplica, 2025
Agency
Multiplica, 2025
Client
Entel
Service
Organizational Transformation, ResearchOps, Service Design
Entel, a telecom company with operations in Chile and Peru, was scaling its digital experience teams. The corporate Center of Excellence had identified significant misalignment in how research was conducted across teams: each followed different methods, timelines, and formats, creating friction, operational fatigue, and inconsistent outcomes.
At the corporate level, there was also low visibility into research practices, making it hard to scale learnings across the organization.
The Challenge
Entel needed to establish a unified foundation for ResearchOps across its digital experience teams in Chile and Peru. This involved standardizing research processes to ensure alignment between countries, reducing operational overhead by avoiding duplicated efforts, and improving the consistency and quality of research deliverables. It was also critical to strengthen collaboration between researchers, designers, and business stakeholders to enable a shared and scalable research practice.
As an independent consultant in strategic design and research operations, I worked full-time for two months in close collaboration with Entel’s research and operations leaders. My work included:
Daily remote collaboration with teams across Chile and Peru.
Engaging key stakeholders: UX research lead, design operations lead, and the COE’s associate management team.
Facilitating workshops and working sessions with research teams to co-create processes tailored to their reality.
Timeline
2 months, full-time engagement.
Research statement and goals
Understand how research was being conducted within Entel’s digital experience teams and design a scalable, organization-wide structure to support operational efficiency and research maturity.
Success criteria
Defined and documented standard research workflows.
Operational alignment across markets and teams.
Adoption of templates and best practices with low friction.
Stakeholder satisfaction and readiness to scale.
Research methodology
Internal interviews with researchers and team leads.
Mapping of existing research processes and tensions.
Benchmarking against ResearchOps best practices.
Co-creation workshops to define language, roles, and shared priorities.
Recruitment criteria and process
All researchers and relevant operational stakeholders across Chile and Peru were included in the process. We prioritized listening to teams with the highest research load and cross-functional complexity.
Sharing and activation
The new system was introduced through live walkthroughs, team onboarding sessions, and iterative feedback loops. Teams validated and refined the templates and flow based on their actual project needs.
Approach
Outputs & deliverables
A standardized end-to-end research workflow, co-created and validated by both research teams.
Documented roles and responsibilities for each stage of the process.
Templates and how-to guides for three prioritized methodologies.
A foundational ResearchOps structure to continue scaling operations across countries.
Recommendations for gradual adoption and future process maturity.
O3
Need for operational visibility and clarity
Corporate leadership had limited insight into how research was being conducted, which made it difficult to assess value or align priorities across teams.
O2
Lack of centralized support
There were no shared templates, reusable artifacts, or onboarding guides, forcing teams to start from scratch on every project.
O1
Fragmentation and inconsistency
Each team had different processes, formats, and quality standards, creating confusion and inefficiencies in cross-team collaboration.
Key findings
Business Value
Impact
→ Time savings: Teams stopped reinventing the wheel. With reusable resources in place, researchers could focus more on analysis and insight generation.
→ Quality improvement: Deliverables became more consistent, structured, and insightful, aligned with standards defined by the teams themselves.
→ Greater visibility: Leadership gained a clearer picture of how research was executed, facilitating better alignment and prioritization.
→ Scalable foundation: The system now supports future integration of metrics, onboarding, and governance practices.
As one stakeholder put it:
“Now our research deliverables have more value and quality. Having a clear process lets us focus on insight, not logistics.”
Reflections
Building ResearchOps doesn’t mean replicating external frameworks—it means designing a system that reflects the real constraints, rhythms, and maturity of each organization. In this project, co-creation was key to legitimacy and adoption. Starting small, aligning language, and focusing on quick wins allowed Entel to take a confident first step toward operational excellence in research.