Perspective – by Jenni Doyle

A Must-Have Tool for all Business Analysts

January 8, 2011 at 8:28 pm 8 comments

Business Analysts can have many tools in their toolbox.  Most of those come from experience or training but I wanted to share my thoughts about an actual piece of equipment I believe that every manager should invest in for their team.

The LiveScribe pen (www.livescribe.com) is an amazing device that could change the effectiveness of a BA overnight.  The pen allows you to take notes on special paper and it records everything said and written in your meeting.  While using it, you can tap to capture a bookmark where you might want to come back to at a later point or you can re-play a conversation from the pen.  You can also pause the recording (written & audio) if the meeting starts to go down an off-topic path (like that never happens).

Once the meeting is over, the BA can upload the meeting to their PC using LiveScribe Desktop.  Once the notes are stored in LiveScribe Desktop, you can store them in a generic “notebook” or divide them out by topic.  You can also search for a word and the software will show you everywhere that word appears in sessions you have uploaded.  Amazing!  No more digging through notebooks of notes or meeting minutes to find what I wrote – a simple search!  And I take a lot of handwritten notes.  For meetings that I’m hosting, they end up being typed up and distributed to participants but for meetings that I’m simply attending, I keep my notes and refer back to them often.

There are different versions of the pen varying by storage size.  I have the 4GB Echo.

That’s the value you get from buying the pen – straight from the box.  Now let me tell you about the add-ons….

LiveScribe has an App Store (I think they had theirs first….).  You can download apps (some free – some not) to enhance your LiveScribe experience.  Evernote (www.evernote.com) – which is a great site even if you don’t have a LiveScribe pen – allows you to upload your notes to their site and make them accessible from any PC.  Now I’d offer caution as I’m fairly particular about where my company-sensitive data goes but for my personal notes for non-work projects (school, volunteer efforts, etc), this is a great resource.  You can also access notes from your smartphone if you download the Evernote app.  Once you download this application onto your PC, it integrates with the LiveScribe Desktop software and you can “share” your LiveScribe notes with Evernote directly upon uploading them to your PC.

Another app that I am trying out right now is MyScript (www.visionobjects.com).  This software translates your uploaded hand-written LiveScribe notes into text.  They offer a free 30 day trial – after that it’s about $30 per year.  If it works, I’d say it’s worth it.  I have used it twice so far.  Both times, the translations were close but it did require a little clean-up.  That’s only fair – my handwriting is far from perfect.  But the software puts your handwritten notes side-by-side with the translated text version so you can quickly scan your notes and identify where fixes are needed.  For a recent meeting where I took handwritten notes with my LiveScribe pen and then was asked to publish them to the rest of the participants, it meant that preparing my notes for publishing took 5 minutes (4 pages of notes) versus what would have likely taken me 15 minutes to type up.

There are many others apps available in the LiveScribe store – including calculators, dictionaries, etc – these are just the first two that I have downloaded.

With a team of BAs that I worked with in the past, these pens were extremely popular.  Many of the BAs that I worked with used them regularly especially for longer meetings that involved brainstorming, interviewing, or JAD elicitation methods.  One BA that I worked with would record her meetings and then listen to her sessions at night to catch additional details to add to her notes so that her participants received the most detailed notes possible.  A very dedicated BA I should add…..  Some BAs just did not enjoy using the pen.  Some preferred to type their notes while in the session and others just loved their own style.  Understandable and I never pressured them to use the pen but I do believe that in many cases, it would have greatly benefited them.

I am getting ready to start classes for my MBA program and my husband recalled this pen as something I had mentioned in the past.  He bought it for me for Christmas to help me with school but knowing it’s abilities, I know it will prove valuable for me at work and at school.

One note of caution – the pen does record audio but you can opt to just record handwriting without the audio.  If you do choose to record the audio in a meeting, you should disclose up front to your participants that you will be recording the session.  More than once, people have commented to me that they are mildly uncomfortable with being recorded in a work-environment meeting.  I remind them that anything they say in a work-related meeting should be appropriate for playback and if it’s not – they should “think before they speak”.  However, recording a session does introduce an interesting legal aspect as the recording could be used as discovery material in a legal situation.  I would recommend talking to your company’s information/security office before using it too broadly.  As with any tool, knowing when & how to use it is important.

I would love to hear from others who have used this tool or any other type of equipment in a BA role.  What other ways could a tool like this prove helpful?  Please post comments & share your thoughts!

I have received no compensation/benefit from any of the companies mentioned in this blog post.  I am simply sharing my perspective on the tools mentioned.  Works for me – may not work for others…..

Entry filed under: Business Analysis, Employee Development, IT, Requirements Management, Technology. Tags: Business Analysis, Enterprise Business Analysis, Information Technology, Requirements Management.