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Reduce Repetition & Boost Accountability: Using Decision Logs to Keep Your Team Aligned

Writer's picture: Nathalie C. Chan King ChoyNathalie C. Chan King Choy

Updated: Sep 20, 2024

Team meeting where the presenter is capturing decisions on a whiteboard

Do you have projects where discussions seem to go in circles, or have stakeholders with short memories who like to question why the team is doing something a certain way in spite of team agreement earlier?  These situations drive me crazy because they waste precious time when you have key players who are either too overwhelmed to keep up or being intellectually lazy.


A helpful tool to address this problem is a decision log: a central written record of decisions that are made, which everyone involved can easily review.


Motivation for keeping a decision log


A project may have a plan document, specifications, and phase exit artifacts.  But there are various meeting series where smaller decisions are made, and these decisions are the ones easily forgotten and subject to questioning.  Even if meeting minutes are kept, it can be a slog to search for when a decision was discussed and finalized, to counter arguments.


Beyond avoiding the time-wasting problem that I described above, decision logs help with transparency, keeping the team on the same page, promoting accountability, and can be used as a reference when planning the next project.


Expanding to Decisions/Conclusions


Sometimes meetings that I am in don’t have a formal decision being made, but rather a discussion around something ambiguous that gets clarified and those involved in the discussion agree on this conclusion.  I find these conclusions are also useful to track in my decision logs, so I will often label these outcomes as “Decisions/Conclusions”.


What to include in your Decisions/Conclusions log


Regardless of what tool you use to record the Decisions/Conclusions, key information to record would be:

  • Date

  • What was decided/concluded

  • Who made the decision or agreed to this conclusion

Optional, but potentially useful details to record could be:

  • Why: The reasoning behind the decision.

  • Status: Was the decision finalized or does it need additional approvers to weigh in

  • Next steps: What is the impact to the project, and what follow-up actions are needed


Decision/Conclusion log format


If you want to create a decision/conclusion log for your project or meeting series, they can take many forms, including:

  • Spreadsheet

  • Page properties report in Confluence

  • Notes in a consistent format that can be parsed by automation

Choose based on your team’s way of working and preferred tools.


Examples of implementing a Decision/Conclusion log


If your team uses Atlassian Confluence, a handy tool is page properties and the page properties report.  I put a page properties table with a Decisions/Conclusions entry on my meeting notes pages.  Then I have a top-level page with my decision log, which will have links to the meeting pages if anyone needs more context to understand the decision.  (I made a YouTube video that walks you through how to do this)


If your team is very text-based (e.g. old school open source projects), you might just standardize on your meeting notes template and could potentially write a script to parse it.  


For those trying to apply AI tools to all busywork problems, I took a stab at having both ChatGPT and BingAI parse a notes wiki page: When fed the web version of the wiki page both AI tool invented meeting dates and couldn’t answer simple explicit questions, so I’d avoid that in Sept 2024. (Hopefully the capabilities improve soon!)  When I uploaded the raw MediaWiki markdown as a text file into ChatGPT, it was more accurate, but behaved as if an intern I hired got distracted at the end of the day to go play soccer. The transcript is at the end of this post for your amusement.  


Conclusion


Incorporating a decision/conclusion log into your projects can be a game-changer, helping to prevent repetitive discussions, maintain team alignment, and promote accountability. By recording not just formal decisions but also important conclusions, you create a transparent and accessible record that everyone can refer to, saving time and reducing confusion. Whether you use tools like Confluence or a simple spreadsheet, the key is to find a method that suits your team's workflow. Start implementing a decision log in your next project or meeting series, and be sure to share it with the whole team and remind them of it regularly. I’d love to hear how it goes for you, please let me know in the comments.


Stay tuned for my upcoming YouTube tutorial for a step-by-step guide on setting up a decision log using the page properties report in Confluence!


Appendix: ChatGPT, the intern who wants to escape to go play soccer


For your amusement, here is my experiment (in September 2024) using ChatGPT to extract a decision log from a notes page that uses a template for each meeting. (GPT answers are shortened, I kept just enough so you get the point)


Prompt 1:

This document is in Mediawiki markdown format. It contains the meeting notes for multiple meetings. Each meeting's section begins with the date of that meeting, in the format YYYY-MM-DD. The meetings are listed in reverse chronological order. Please analyze this document and I will ask you questions about it.


Answer 1:

I've analyzed the document you provided, which is a collection of meeting notes in Mediawiki markdown format, covering multiple meetings in reverse chronological order. Each meeting entry starts with the date in the format "YYYY-MM-DD" and includes sections like "Attended," "Agenda," "Decisions/conclusions," "Action items," and "Notes." The notes seem to revolve around project discussions, task updates, decisions, and action items primarily related to the OpenAMP project.


Feel free to ask any specific questions you have about the content, structure, or details within the document!


Prompt 2: (interviewing my intern for competence)

What is the most recent meeting listed in this document?


Answer 2: (correct)

The most recent meeting listed in the document is from 2024-08-07.


Prompt 3: (continuing the intern’s interview)

What are the bullets in the "Decisions/conclusions" section of that meeting?


Answer 3: (correct)

The "Decisions/conclusions" section of the 2024-08-07 meeting contains the following bullets:

- Would be nice if the project had some generic code that could use on multiple RTOS & platforms, but currently a weak spot for project. Have to provide some hooks so each platform can implement in their BSP, so that demo can be generic & portable, but it isn't the case for all demos right now.

- Release images are tagged but no release email yet due to doc update outstanding.


Prompt 4: (the real assignment)

Please provide me a table where the first column is the date of the meeting and the second column is the bullets in the corresponding "Decisions/conclusions" section.  If there is no such section on that meeting date, just put "N/A".  I would like the rows to be in reverse chronological order.


Answer 4: (starts off OK, then got distracted)

Here's a table summarizing the "Decisions/conclusions" sections from the meetings listed in the document:


| Date       | Decisions/conclusions                                     |
|------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| 2024-08-07 | - Would be nice if the project had some generic code that could use on multiple RTOS & platforms, but currently a weak spot for project. Have to provide some hooks so each platform can implement in their BSP, so that demo can be generic & portable, but it isn't the case for all demos right now. <br> - Release images are tagged but no release email yet due to doc update outstanding. |
| 2024-07-10 | N/A                                                       |
| 2024-04-03 | - Nothing planned for ELC at OSS Europe CFP               |
| 2024-03-20 | - Probably need to delay 2024.04 release                  |
| 2024-03-06 | N/A                                                       |
| 2024-02-21 | N/A                                                       |
| 2024-02-07 | N/A                                                       |
| 2024-01-24 | N/A                                                       |

This table provides a summary of the decisions or conclusions reached during each meeting. If there is no "Decisions/conclusions" section for a particular date, "N/A" is indicated.


Prompt 5: (I’d like the job finished)

You missed the "Decisions/conclusions" for the meetings 2024-02-21 and earlier. Please provide those rows.


Answer 5: (it is capable of giving the desired answer, but it didn't!)

Here are the additional rows for the "Decisions/conclusions" sections from the meetings on 2024-02-21 and earlier:


| Date       | Decisions/conclusions                                     |
|------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| 2024-02-21 | - Let's discuss next time with T the docs ones in this list: https://github.com/… |
| 2024-02-07 | - Let's wait until we have B & T to review the issue queues  |
| 2024-01-24 | - It doesn't make sense to do much work on doc cleanup right now if we're considering bringing in a contractor to make big changes. |

This completes the list of "Decisions/conclusions" sections for all the meetings in the document.


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