As you work through a project over time, you and your team will make decisions. These might be technical decisions, design decisions, user experience decisions. It could be the decision to cut scope to get a release out sooner and then fast follow.

What tends to be common with all these things is that at some point in the future, someone on your team or from another team or a stakeholder of the project will not be clear on why a decision to do something was made or how we got to that choice.

Enter decisions #

Decisions in Project & Goal status tracking are a lightweight way to capture what important choices a team has made during the course of a project that should be communicated more broadly than just your team.

As important decisions are made take the time to capture what was decided and why. Use the 'Decisions' tab on the project view and make good use of the editor to document what has been decided.

This will get added to the list of decisions that have been tracked for the project.

Decisions made during a project week will get added to the update for that week and will also be included in any email or Slack updates that get sent.

What sort of decisions should be recorded? #

Great question. Teams make decisions during the course of a project on a daily basis, and not everything that is decided needs to be communicated broadly.

Let's take some examples #

Technical decisions on patterns, architecture, code review process etc - these probably don't need to be shared to project followers or stakeholders. They're interesting for the project team and maybe other teams, so document and record them somewhere like Confluence and share them from there.

Technical decisions to introduce new technology or languages etc - these probably are worth recording as decisions in Jira project status as these are new and different and a new technology being used for the first time could easily have an impact on how a project runs.

Scope decisions - these are definitely worth recording. A change to a project's scope or deliverables is going to be something that people are interested in hearing about and how you got to that decision.

The general rule of thumb to apply is that if it could potentially affect the project delivery or is something time sensitive or if you heard about it and didn't know the context you'd be surprised about it - you should probably record it.