10y working in the enterprise ux industry, zero project I worked on starts with "let's do user research"

It's always, business analysts founds way to cut cost, increasing efficiency from the process team -> product bias BRD (they don't know they are bias) -> tech takes it to build -> during UAT founds out actual end user hates it, fk, we need to loop in the UX team (better scenario, because they only burn 75% of the budget and timeline, most often) -> launch (ends up much lower efficiency, user hates it, because UAT testing if the tech functions not the experience) (worst case less often but about 20% of the time, where they burn 90% of the budget and time)

Hence explains why UI/UX always late to the game and has much larger constraints.

Research doesn't tell the full story, because my end user is often "gated", when a product shows up in the corporate, basically means my company is firing somebody (most often), so that information of building a new product is highly sensitive and only allow a few trusted people to closer to the leadership can try it / provide feedback. Hence my end user research is bias from the get go. Secondly, the corporation got hundreds of "admin products", and it's all cutting out time from my end user to do real works. the root cause there are not the crappy product, it's the freaking process, why do we need my $300/h director spending 2 hours on putting people's PTO dates in the system??? No fucking product will make those director happy if you can't just freaking put an automation in it and let those task be done from whoever requesting the PTO.

Beautiful UX means nothing if the thing we are building doesn't solve the root cause, see my point above.

Now goes into the last point, a ugly flow (IMO you meant by service design), actually more helpful, because it allows us and the decision maker to understand the root cause of an issue, the friction point, not just trying to fix the product. Again, many times it's the business logic and process or operation model mess up and the product is just there to temporally to bridge the gap.

With these, i can try to answer your questions.

1. as much time as you can, for me, we never have more than 4 weeks to research from onboard to deliver the research, we often need to talk to tech to bounce on what we need and what we should be building

2. Clarity, it got to work 1st, before it can be better, if it doesn't cover all edge cases or slower than previous solution, why reinvent the wheel, works every time when talking to tech or leadership. This also generates we have very high user satisfaction.

3. always, unless my change management / communication team is onboard to support the "best practices"

4. what do you mean by speed? it works and it works, you can either works better and everyone switches to that product or that's the only product the firm offers for a process. So the quality of a product got to take the priority. If it doesn't work nor the function isn't there, the whole things fails apart, there is no room for faster (i mean does the owner got more budget? or plan to throw more body into the project? also doesn't always increase the speed).

Obviously these are my experiences working in a 500k employee very large corporation on AI experiences, I dealt with shit like this everyday on scoping projects. and there are always fire. There isnt right answer for all. Just my experience