The largest gathering of business analysts and business analysis in the Southern hemisphere is around the corner! This year, like last year, the conference will be virtual. However, it promises to exceed ALL expectations. The speaker line up is epic and so are the topics up for presentations and discussions. The conference is themed and organized around the accelerated changes to business and personal lives globally – occasioned by yes, the pandemic.    

Popularized by the wiz, Walt Disney. Plussing is a concept applied by product managers to make a good product great. It is easy to apply. You have a product in the market that customers are using (or you have just introduced what you believe is the MVP for your product). You ‘plus’ by planning, scheduling and releasing additional features to the product. With the aim of making a good product great! Or converting a bad product to a good one. To ‘plus’ you don’t thumb-suck what to add. Rather you rely on qualitative and quantitative measures to choose between the many possibly options to add to your product. That’s where research methods like talking to the customers, reading the bug reports, interviewing colleagues in Ops, monitoring industry trends, monitoring macro-economic conditions etc., come to play.

Short, self contained stories or reports of true events or people. Useful as a way to remember key points. Useless as a way of conveying important information. Useless because for those without context of what the anecdote summarises, the risk of misunderstanding rises significantly. So when creating anecdotes, include as much breadth and depth as you can manage. And when consuming anecdotes from others, ask a few questions: what is this really about? is this really plausible? are there supporting information out there If you do, chances are, you will not believe and make fundamental decisions on half or never truths. — Image credit: https://medium.com/@philcross/the-bias-in-anecdote-6bca97f950c5

One of my favorite prioritisation tools. Short for: MUST haves. High priority items that the product/opportunity or challenge being addressed MUST have. These are product launch blockers. If you don’t have them in place, you don’t launch. Example: in South Africa and European Union, for any customer facing product, alignment to the privacy regulations (POPI and GDPR respectively) is non-negotiable. This is a MUST have! SHOULD haves. Important. But not sufficient to prevent product release. If your product were a flight, these items will be business class passengers, given that MUST haves are in first class. COULD haves. Nice to haves. Can do without them really. WON’T haves. Items totally out of scope.   Image credit: https://www.scrumdesk.com/prioritization-moscow/moscow-cards/

A YouTube channel? A course? A new career? A baking class? Sometimes, the fear we feel is healthy and can urge us on albeit carefully. Sometimes, it is crippling and it is the reason we never start or even try. Irrespective of the the type of of fear or the issue that is causing it, you may find that taking the time to begin to explore the options however slowly, however carefully, may diminish the fear. Start now. A step at a time.