Decision Making Process Template-EN

In the IIBA BABOK® there is an underlying competency required of BA professionals called Decision Making. This competency area is defined as “providing a description of the behaviors, characteristics, knowledge and personal qualities that support the practice of business analysis.” However, the Decision Making competency doesn’t support what you do as a business analysis professional, it is what you do.. Specifically, decision making should be viewed not as something that supports your work, but rather as the inverse – your analysis techniques and processes should support making decisions.

Nothing happens without decisions. As an analysis professional, it’s your job to facilitate the decision making process. Afterall, the reason analysis is done in the first place is to help make decisions and without decisions, progress can’t be made. Start thinking of all the analysis techniques and processes as supporting tools to facilitate decision making. Having this mindset will allow you to make decisions on what is most important.  If the activity you are about to take on helps the team come to a good decision faster…do it.

The following templates are MS Excel documents that can be printed or used electronically to plan and track your project decisions.

This template package includes:

• Path of Decision to Delivery: use this exercise to help define a list of questions that need to be answered in order to deliver results.
• Decision Responsibility Matrix: determine how the team will work together by defining the path of decisions and the decision making roles.
• Decision Log: keep track of the decisions made (or not made). Use this as a tool for returning to see what decision was made, by whom and why it was made or tabled.