You Need Superhero Virtual Elicitation Skills!

simply Showing Up To Online meetings won't Solve your challenges

As a remote business analyst, working on projects as part of a distributed team, you have to be able to elicit requirements virtually.

In fact, you have to be even MORE capable when working remotely—when eliciting requirements by email, when conducting video interviews and when facilitating online workshops—than you have to be when working face-to-face with your business and project stakeholders.

But virtual requirements elicitation is a huge challenge.

You're sat behind your desk, far-removed from the business, with only a computer screen for a window to make sense through. Grappling with how you should manage your stakeholders, how to read their engagement levels, knowing the right questions to ask them and choosing the best techniques to use.

You want to do quality work, but you're left with this frustrating feeling that you're just not translating all of your real-world skills into the online world.

Does elicitation feel more like extraction?

 StrugglIng To find the right way to go about Remote business analysis Work

It's challenging to identify the right stakeholders, making sure that everyone who should be included, is included. And knowing how to manage each appropriately, particularly how to handle those tricky ones—the critics and the blockers.

There’s the difficulty of building rapport and gaining trust, especially when having to start new relationships from scratch, digitally. Plus the problem of knowing what questions to ask, the type of questions to ask—knowing how to structure and funnel them for maximum effect.

Then comes the stress of stakeholder engagement, the gauging of people’s attention levels–whether they’re interested; that they’re present and involved. As well as wondering if you’re reading the non-verbal signs correctly—like their body language, facial expressions, the tone in their voice, etc. And interpreting this through the lens of a webcam, if they even have their video on.

And knowing what technique to use; interviews, workshops, observation, focus groups, surveys, etc., when to use them, and above all how to do them successfully, over the telephone, email and a conference call.

You worry about each of these things, as you try to elicit complete, correct and comprehensive requirements.

Are You Feeling overwhelmed By Busy-Ness?

Juggling The many acts and sideshows of Being A Business Analyst

With so much going on, so much to juggle, you struggle to balance it.

Asking the questions, and scribing the answers, at the same time, while thinking about the next question too. Plus worrying whether everyone is getting ample opportunity to speak, and wondering if the conversation is going down a rabbit hole.  

You have this constant mental balancing act.

With the added jeopardy of technology—coordinating people who talk over one another, and the sharing of screens back and forth—it’s difficult to keep your grip on everything that's going on.

You breathe, deeply. It's exhausting.

Then you try to make-up for it by scheduling follow-up sessions—yet more meetings. You compensate by working harder at it, and by putting in long hours, but it doesn’t help and it feels bad. At the end of the workday, you look back and it just feels like you’re not really making good progress.  

The situation feels really frustrating, and in addition to feeling this lack of effectiveness, you make yourself feel bad about it too.

Is Your Nemesis called analysis paralysis?

Seeing The Big Business Analyst crash happen In Front Of your Own eyes

It's even worse if you're a serially-paralysed analyst, because if you’re prone to analysis-paralysis by now you can feel this coming.

You’re not sure where to start, what to tackle first, or whom to meet with.

You put together a set of draft questions, but as soon as you get going your questions snowball. Your job is to reduce uncertainty, yet your own uncertainty just grows. You begin to doubt the scope of the project—what's required. And you begin to doubt yourself—you’re just not sure if you’re getting anywhere, or exactly where you should be heading.

It feels like there’s this towering mountain of work to climb.

And that's when you’re asked for an update: "Is the document is ready for review?".

You’ve barely started and you’re not sure how much longer you need. The pressure is already on, so you piece bits together—filling out a template for the sake of it, and filling in the requirements gaps yourself—just to get something drafted.

It's like watching a car crash in slow motion—you're seeing this happen, but you can't do much about it.

And again, you end up feeling bad. So in addition to not being effective, you also have this negative self-talk and feel demotivated by the situation.

It feels very unsatisfying when you want to do good work—you want to frame the big-picture and solve the right business problems, you want to make something happen as an business analyst—but at the end of the day you feel like you're ticking a box just to hit project deadlines.

It’s not something you’re proud of, so what do you do? You soak up every remote working tip and trick...

Why remote working tips Don't cut it

You're A Specialist who Deserves more than Generic #WFH Snake Oil

There is a lot of virtual advice readily available on the internet, especially the more popular kind of remote working tips and tricks.

The trouble is that advice is hopelessly generic—it's aimed at generalists who simply work from home and attend online meetings.

And as useful as these hacks may be about continuing to get yourself dressed in the morning, and positioning a post-it note on your monitor to remind yourself to look directly at the camera, it simply doesn’t go deep enough for the type of specialist work that you do.

You are not a generalist who simply works from home and runs online meetings—being a remote business analyst means being much more nuanced than that.

You're a specialist and the type of sessions you faciliate—interviews, observations, workshops—require a greater finesse than this business-pop level of guidance gives, it just doesn’t cut it for what you do. The reality is in how much deeper your engagement needs to go, it's in how much more skill is needed for what you do well, it's in the deep level of expertise you need.

Any virtual business analysis advice that assumes that if you can run an effective meeting, if you stick to an agenda, maintain eye contact and smile, then at the end of the session you’ll naturally have a good set of requirements is hopelessly flawed.

dodging the Fairy Tale silver bullet

Beware best practices that promise but never deliver the happy ending

Another important point is that to be good at virtual requirements elicitation you don't need to adopt a large, complex, closed method where you have to apply the whole thing in order for it to give value.

This is a problem that you see all the time.

The promises of yet another silver-bullet approach where you have to implement all these particular, fashionable practices. Practices that guarantee that if you implement them in this certain way and manage your projects, tasks and deliverables accordingly then you'll be a lot more effective. 

What happens in the real world is that you try to build this entire system from A to Z, but it takes too much effort and too much time, and parts of the system don't match the way you do things so you end up with this 30% or 50% bit-part version. And, of course, because it's not the whole system it doesn't stand a chance, and you give up and you go back to whatever you were doing before which was ineffective but at least it's not quite as frustrating.

There is no such thing as best practice, only good practice.

And good practice is about having techniques that work regardless of the different kinds of types of projects—business, process, or IT systems—or the different kinds of approaches— no matter whether waterfall, agile or hybrid—or however you package requirements—in a requirements document, as use cases or user stories.

The Simple Truth is: if You Don't harness your b.a. superpowers you may as well be A P.A.

If you think about the virtual elicitation struggles that you're facing, I have had all of them too.

And that's why I've created this course, to cover the key strategies and tactics that I employ to solve all of these virtual problems for myself (and for the people who’ve worked with me on distributed projects).

The first step is learn techniques that you can apply to make your elicitation more powerful. Until you do so, nothing else matters. No virtual advice or tip or hack or habit or rapid requirements system is going to make a difference if your elicitation skills are not up to scratch.

Once you maximise your ability to elicit, you'll unlock a level of effectiveness you've not experienced before. You'll be amazed at what you're capable of achieving! That brings us to step 2, which is to take the right actions to move towards your goals.

Hello, I'm Joe Newbert

I’d love to teach you my most successful strategies, techniques, and other secrets.

In 2001 I first worked as a business analyst on remote projects, with geographically dispersed users and a development team on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Since then 

But not all my work has been remote - much has been onsite too, meaning I know how it works in real life as well as in the online world.

And that over the last 20 years, as a consultant, I’ve performed business analysis and managed projects…

from London to the US, and back.

From Cape Town to Europe.

And I’ve even managed off-shore teams in India delivering on-shore to Africa.

All for companies that feature strongly on the New York Stock Exchange, Footsie 100, and JSE. 

Since 2001, numerous projects, distributed locations, multiple time-zones, across cultures, all implemented successfully.

I run several successful businesses, including Smart Passive Income, Green Business Academy, and SPI Labs. Over the course of the last decade, I've conceived of and developed dozens of products and new businesses. I've both succeeded and failed, and all the while I've charted my progress to find what works and what doesn't. I've also interviewed hundreds of other business owners to learn from their stories, which you can find on The Smart Passive Income Podcast.

I've heard the same struggles from aspiring entrepreneurs time and again: "I don't know how to find a business idea," or "I don't know if my idea will work," or the biggest one, "I'm afraid I will fail."

I want you to learn from my successes and failures. I’ve poured these experiences into the Smart From Scratch® course to give you insight into the business strategies that truly work from start to finish. I'm here to help you find your idea, to figure out if it will work, and to teach you how to fail early so that it doesn't hurt as much. I'm here to help you—let's get started!

Now is your chance to get my brand new business analysis course "Virtual Elicitation" and make your 2020 work from home your most successful ever.

IS THIS COURSE FOR ME?

Yes, If You're Business Analysts with a virtual point to prove

This course is for people who already have an online presence. It’s not for people who are just thinking of starting a business and starting from scratch.

The audience size doesn't matter—you can actually benefit quite heavily from implementing these strategies early on in your business—but you need to know who you're serving and have some sort of following online, whether it's in a small email list, on social media, or a website with a bit of traffic.

What it comes down to is this: I don’t want to sell you anything that you cannot benefit from.

That’s simply not how I do things. I want you to succeed. And if you don’t have any online presence yet, this course is not going to help you succeed.

When you're ready, I’ll be here for you.

remote working

cv

What will i Discover In?

You'll Discover very Cool Ways to Do Virtual Elicitaion

The Modular System That Fits YOU

Virtual Elicitation is an online course that you can take at your own pace. It consists of video lessons, worksheets and loads of specific implementation tasks.

focus & action is a modular system, covering topics like goal setting, project and task management, calendar blocking & scheduling, deep work and habit building.

The system is designed to work as a cohesive whole, but it also works in parts. That means you'll start to see results of heightened productivity as soon as you start implementing. Even if you only follow 1 or 2 of the strategies in focus & action, you'll start saving hours of time and getting projects across the finish line sooner.

This is not a fragile system that only works when you have all the pieces in place and you follow everything to the letter.

focus & action is a step-by-step system to help you gradually level up and eventually become a productivity badass.

This isn't COURSE ABOUT RUNNING BETTER MEETINGS... and that matters!

And the final point in which Virtual Elicitation is very different from what you often find, is that this is not one of those ‘7 or 8-step business analysis process’ type approaches.

I see a lot of business analysis courses that rely a lot on broad steps and shitty templates where you are broadly told to ‘define detailed requirements’ and fill in the fairly directionless ‘BA Deliverables’.

And sure even broad steps and shitty templates can get some requirements documented sometimes.

But it is not the best way to go about eliciting real requirements, ones that solve true business problems.

And it’s likely to result in much more work and stress down the line – with missed or misunderstood requirements, scope changes, rework, etc.

Then if you bring all this pressure upon yourself then what?! You're just under pressure and you're feeling miserable.

And so even if it helps tick a box in the short-term, is that really the BA life you want to live?

WHAT WILL I LEARN?

THE TOOLS AND STRATEGIES YOU NEED TO BECOME A hot-shot Virtual business analyst