Contextual inquiry can be conducted remotely for certain types of tasks, provided that your participants can share most of their work setting through a video-call platform.
You don't have to do all UX research yourself. You should learn from existing published work, which will save you much time, especially when beginning a new project.
Rule #1 for all user research is to study participants who are representative of the target audience. 5 best practices for recruiting screeners will improve the validity of your research.
