Meetings and minutes
Decision log
A running list of decisions across meetings, with date, owner and reasoning.
A decision log is one list of everything decided in a project or a body, across the meetings. It lives alongside the minutes, not instead of them.
A row typically looks like this:
| # | Date | Decision | Decided by | Reasoning | Source |
|---|------|----------|------------|-----------|--------|
| 14| 12.08| Launch moved to 1.10 | Kari N. | Integration testing took three weeks longer | Minutes 12.08 |What it solves
Minutes are chronological, not searchable. To find out what was decided about the choice of supplier, you have to search through twelve sets of minutes and remember roughly when it was. In the log it is one line.
Decisions get taken again. Without somewhere to look it up, the same matter comes back every time a new person joins the project.
The reasoning disappears. The decision is in the minutes. Why it was taken often is not. The log forces one sentence about what was decisive, and that is the sentence people go looking for six months later.
Keeping it alive
- One line per decision, written the same day as the minutes.
- One name in “decided by”. Even when the group agreed.
- Link to the source, that is, the minutes where it was taken.
- Delete nothing. If a decision is reversed, add a new row referring to the old one. The history is half the value.