Skip to main content

Decision making techniques

Decision making can be difficult. This guide includes techniques which can be used to help make decisions, as well as guidance on how to record decisions.

Techniques

Pre-mortems

This exercise is usually undertaken at the start of a project to identify potential risks and problems ahead. The team will ask itself:

What could go wrong?

You should then discuss ways to prevent the problem occuring, whilst also discussing mitigations if the risk occurs.

You can read more about pre-mortems and how to run a session here on Fun Retrospective

MoSCoW prioritisation

This exercise is a very useful technique when making decisions on scope of a project or task. It can help the team focus on the key deliverables and improve the pace of delivery.

You’ll first need to identify all potential tasks you could undertake, then sort them into the following categories:

  • must
  • should
  • could
  • won’t

You must also provide a rationale as to why this choice was made, and ensure this is documented for future reference.

This exercise can be done as a group discussion, or as an individual exercise where team members asynchronously contribute their decisions. You can see an example of the latter here when we were deciding on which guidance to ship as part of Exit this page. This technique does however require an accountable decision maker, who will review the thoughts and rationale shared by the team and decide on how to proceed.

You can read more about the MoSCoW framework here on ProductPlan

There are also fun variations of this exercise such as ‘Cupcake — Cake — Wedding Cake’ as seen here on Fun Retrospectives.

Risk vs benefit analysis / pros vs cons

A fairly simple exercise which can be used to make a decision on a particular topic. It allows the team to list all the potential benefits associated with doing a thing, and then all the potential risks. The team can then discuss how the risks can be mitigated.

This exercise can also highlight risks which are too great. These are usually the risks where it’s difficult to mitigate.

This exercise is useful for building confidence within a team when making a decision. It ensures all aspects have been explored, and there is a plan for what to do if a risk materialises.

Recording decisions

As well as making decisions, it’s also important to record key decisions which are made as part of a project. This ensures the rationale can be revisited in the future, by any team member. This is particularly useful when providing support to users who want more information about our decision making.

There are a few tools you can use to record decisions:

Ask for help

If you’re unsure of how to apply any of these techniques, or need help to identify the appropriate technique for your scenario, reach out to a delivery or product manager who can help with this.