How I quit my job to make the decision log you always wanted
Decision logging has to be transparent, be as painless as possible and should motivate reaching decisions quickly. This is why almost a year ago I decided to leave my wonderful colleagues at a digital agency to work on my own project. The farewell was all but easy. I had spent three and a half years there, making friends and growing professionally, working with dedicated and passionate teams and learning so much from and with them. Good times, but there was something that I had to do. So with the pandemic just getting started I decided to work on a problem that kept bugging me for a good time of my career as a developer.
Many solutions but no remedy
While working with bigger and smaller teams, together with large and small clients I saw one particular problem recur: How can we document decisions? And there were plenty of decisions to be made! Decisions about the software architecture, decisions about the release, about features, about design details, about accounting, about project planning…
We tried various approaches, each with their own benefits and downfalls. When we wrote decisions into tickets, we had a hard time revisiting them. New team-members got overwhelmed and often it was not easy to see if we really had buy-in from stakeholders. We also tried the decision log in Confluence but it often became complicated because Confluence was hosted on clients’ premises and team-members lacked access. Also, it still was too much work to summon all needed stakeholders to give their opinions in a timely manner and agree on a final version of a decision. We even tried ADR in our repository. But apart from developers, nobody really wanted to use that solution. Since the teams often worked together with clients remotely, a lot of conversations happened in Slack or Teams anyway, but writing down decisions there reduced their discoverability to zero. Some clients kept their decisions in Excel sheets, which fell short after a few months because everybody started to have different versions of said sheet. It became clear: important decisions need to be documented differently.
Why you should log decisions
Well documented decisions improve accountability and reduce the time they are discussed over and over again. With a proper decision log, new team members — but also higher management — can reconstruct the current state of a project. It reduces unnecessary discussions between developers as well as between business partners. Furthermore, it gives Service Designers guidance to push a project forward.
Mid of June 2020, after exploring many different approaches to solve this problem, I pitched my idea of a better decision log to two friends. We jotted down a rough concept that we would elaborate on over the next months. Only in October we finally came up with a name: Loqbooq
Keep the knowledge together
Our main concern was the ease of use (nobody wants to learn yet another tool) and getting close to where decision making happens. Decisions should be recorded directly when they are made, with as little effort as possible. Hence, we chose to create a very clean web app with a really solid Slack integration. So when a Slack, Zoom or in-person discussion results in a decision, Loqbooq makes it straightforward to record it. It provides a simple form for title, decision result and considerations and also allows you to directly assign team members to review it. Subsequently you save all the boilerplate and get a clean and structured decision log.
The increase in remote working and the resulting physical distance in the workplace makes it hard to just pop by someone’s desk for a quick heads up. Keeping the knowledge together in a team becomes more challenging. I believe that teams need a place where they bring discussions to an end. A single source of truth they can refer back to later. A tool that increases transparency about buy-in from management and consent from designers and developers. Recording decisions is a crucial aspect of any project and it deserves a professional and dedicated approach.
Loqbooq is exactly that. Even if it is not the right fit for you or your team, I can assure you, having a solid decision log will actually prevent escalating conflicts, reduce unnecessary discussions and save everybody time and stress.
