Come out next Thursday Jan 30th at 1pm for a coffee or lunch.    We’ll be at Brunetti’s on Swanston & Flinders Lane from 1-2pm.

If it’s nice weather, we’ll sit outside and you can BYOB lunch or pick up something at Brunetti’s.

Look for Jen & Liz and/or the product anonymous logo.   We’ll tweet our exact location once we’ve arrived.

What is Coffee Catch-up?

For those who can’t attend our evening sessions, or want more product management chat than just 1x a month, we have a casual catch up during the day.    There’s no speakers, no topics, the focus is on meeting new folks, catching up with people and having a chat.

RSVP at eventbrite is nice but not required.  It just gives us an idea of how much space we should attempt to reserve.

Note: our google calendar previously said 2pm but we have fixed it.  if you subscribe to the calendar, it should have changed.   to subscribe to the calendar, go to our events page.

Our 1st ever book club event is coming up this month & we’ve choosen Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by the Heath brothers.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered decision making in our topics – last June, Steve Bauer did a prodanon session and then turned the session into a series of blog posts.  You can check them out here:

• Our introduction of the topic & wrap-up from the Product Anonymous meeting
• Steve’s introduction to his series: The Art of Decision Making
• The Process (part 1) of the series including a 6 step framework
• Defining the problem (part 2)
• Defining the people in the problem (part 3)
• Identifying alternatives (part 4)
• Evaluating alternatives (part 5)
• Decision Time (part 6)
• Implementation (part 7)
• Learn & Evaluate (part 8)

So come along, bring a friend and share a war story

January 23rd meet-up: Book club on Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath. Start time 6pm, for 6:30pm kick-off, at the Mail Exchange Hotel, back room behind the Restaurant area. Bourke and Spencer st.
RSVP below or click this button to go to Eventbrite for full details

This article continues the discussion from Product Anonymous back in June last year.  Full credit goes to the team and the attendees for providing key steps, insight and critical analysis.

In the last set of posts we defined the problem (topic and people), identified some alternatives, evaluated those alternatives, and even decided and implemented . The final step in the process is #6 – To learn and evaluate.

Now is the time to follow up on the decision; is the implementation going well, has the environment changed and what can you learn from it

Maintain your heading

Publicly stick with your decision.  If the team sees doubt then their commitment to the decision may drop, and it will be less effective.  Reiterating the decision outcome (or in PR terms being ‘on message’)  can seem like a waste of effort for you, but for everyone else who wasn’t part of the process it seems like new information.

Again, the plan is the plan until there is a new plan.

Monitor the outcomes

Follow up on how the decision is being implemented.  Are people working on it? Are the necessary steps being taken?  Are existing processes being modified?  If it is not being implemented then you have further influencing to do.

Follow up on the key metrics and points that were part of the decision analysis.  Are you getting the savings, revenue or traffic you predicted?  Are results shown in both quantitative and qualitative form?  Is everything else being held constant?

Adapt to changes by iterating

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Niels Bohr

It is a fact of life that every decision can have unintended consequences.  Or you may find that the decision-making assumptions were wrong.  Or you just aren’t getting the results you were expecting. Or you may just be plain wrong.

The important thing is that you stay on top of the outcomes of the decision, and get involved before they escalate out of hand.  The interesting project work always involves unknowns, and mistakes will be made.

Learn

The whole decision making cycle is a perfect opportunity to learn about the business, the process, and the people involved.

Step back and think about the bigger picture.  For example: What would you do differently next time?  How would you have achieved the same result in only 10% of the time?  How could you achieved the same outputs with only 10% of the budget?

Always ask yourself: What will you do better next time?

We are now done.  We have taken the full 6 part process and looked at some of the stickier issues within corporate decision making.

Have you got any other tools to help you make decisions? Please feel free to comment below to add to the discussion.

Go back & read part 7 on Implementation.

Steve is a Product Development Manager at Telstra Wholesale.  The views expressed in this post are his only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra.

This article continues the discussion from Product Anonymous back in June last year.  Full credit goes to the team and the attendees for providing key steps, insight and critical analysis.

In the last set of posts we defined the problem (topic and people), identified some alternatives, evaluated those alternatives, and then deciding.  Step #5 in the process is to implement that decision.

Ok.  We have made our decision.  Woohoo!

Now what?

Surely everyone will just crack on with it?

Communicate the decision so that it can be implemented.

And this might mean communicating well beyond the immediate team tasked with the implementation.  There are usually some impacted teams that you haven’t considered out there that need to be informed.  So back to the RACI model and consider the ‘Informed’ folk.

You may need to use your influence to get help from other people to implement it. There may be some resistance, but with a well reasoned decision process then you should have no trouble getting commitment and support from everyone.  You are going to need them to be ‘all in’ so they can run with the new decision.

Use the momentum

There will now be some momentum behind the decision as you have already involved a bunch of stakeholders.  Get the stakeholders to help implement and promote the decision.  Get them involved in the next decision that is the natural progression of the current.  Keep that momentum going.

Kill the alternatives

Depending on your culture, it may be necessary to kill the other alternatives. Because of the decision making process there may be doubt about whether the final solution is the best solution.

It is possible for a company to continue using resources on the unchosen option in the name of ‘risk mitigation’, ‘creating a plan B’, or ‘I disagree so I’ll do it my way’. It may be necessary to prevent each of the alternatives from being implemented just to prevent the waste of resources.

Alexander the Great may have burned his boats upon arrival on the shores of Persia as a sign of commitment.  While you may not have to be as extreme, you don’t want to waste resources on options that may never bear fruit.

The plan is the plan until there is a new plan.

We have now implemented our decision, but it is still not over.  Perhaps there is some iteration or learning ahead.  Next we’ll look at what we can learn.

Have you got any other tools to help you make decisions? Please feel free to comment below to add to the discussion.

Go back to Part 6: Decision time.

Steve is a Product Development Manager at Telstra Wholesale.  The views expressed in this post are his only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra.