Tool management and vendor operations for scalable research systems
Frequent legal partner changes and limited understanding of research practices led to procurement delays, requiring repeated alignment on customer data usage, incentive structures, and outreach goals.
A key opportunity was to establish consistent partnership between dedicated research and legal stakeholders—reducing repeated effort, minimizing confusion, and ensuring shared understanding of research workflows to prevent shifting guidance or access changes.
Created a shared inventory of approved research tools with documentation on use cases, access instructions, training requirements, and licensing info. Moved away from fragmented procurement practices to a centralized model that improved visibility, accountability, cost sharing, and overall cost savings by combining multiple departmental subscriptions under a single contract.
Collaborated with procurement, legal, and security to define standard workflows for research vendor onboarding—covering data privacy reviews, contract approvals, SOW negotiation, and renewal tracking. Formed a dedicated partnership between the Research Operations lead and Privacy lead to align on research practices, customer engagement, and data management. This collaboration reduced onboarding time and improved compliance across tools and vendors.
Integrated tools with SSO and internal systems wherever possible, reducing manual effort and simplifying user management. Automated renewal reminders, access workflows, and usage tracking helped scale with minimal overhead.
Created onboarding guides and toolkits to help researchers and collaborators quickly adopt tools. Minimized operational bottlenecks by enabling self-serve support, establishing a shared Slack channel with one vendor, and providing same-day access to UserTesting’s Foundational Certification pathway through pre-arranged credit availability.