With COVID being at the forefront of everyone’s mind and the majority of people working remotely, remote working is here to stay atleast for a while. According to a survey done by buffer.com 98% of workers surveyed would not mind working remotely for the rest of their career. As a BA it becomes a challenge although the perks are many. Challenges arise as an outcome of eliciting requirements, brainstorming thoughts, and the day to day benefits of being in a room physically to notice body language. However with the new norm being virtual, here are some tips on running virtual workshops as a BA:
- Plan the approach ahead of time: Think through what you will be covering at a meeting ahead of time. This will help you facilitate meetings better.
- Create an Agenda: Once you have planned an approach put it down as an Agenda.
- Use Tools: Depending on where you work, you may or may not be allowed to use third party vendors. Listed below are a couple of tools to use while conducting virtual workshops.
| Teams | Whiteboard and screen share to conduct meetings |
| Zoom | Collaborate using the screen share and other tools |
| Miron | People can vote using the tool and conduct other collaborative games |
| Google Meetings | You can screen share and is widely used since it syncs up well with other tools |
There are many tools online but the purpose of the article is to give you a high level overview of running virtual workshops.
- Set up Guiding Princiapls: Establish your guiding principals, such as request participants to turn on their camera’s during the session, establish norms around raising the virtual hand if the participants have questions or feedback etc.
- Timebox conversations: If you have a finite time with you participants, set your expectations upfront that conversation will be timeboxed to x minutes, beyond that conversations or questions will need to be timeboxed.
- Follow up meetings with Action Items and next steps. This will bring closure to the meeting and align conversations around next steps.
