decision-record-template-for-business-case

Decision record template for business case

This ADR template emphasizes creating a business case for a decision, including criteria, candidates, and costs.

Top-level

• Title
• Status
• Evaluation criteria
• Candidates to consider
• Research and analysis of each candidate
  • Does/doesn't meet criteria and why
  • Cost analysis
  • SWOT analysis
  • Opinions and feedback
• Recommendation

Low-level deep dive

Title:

• A short present tense imperative phrase, less than 50 characters, like a git commit message.

Status:

• One of proposed, accepted, rejected, deprecated, superseded, etc.

Evaluation criteria:

• Summary: explain briefly what we seek to discover and why.

• Specifics

Candidates to consider:

• Summary: explain briefly how we discovered candidates, and draw attention to any outliers.

• List all candidates and related options; what are we evaluating as potential solutions?

• Specifics

Research and analysis of each candidate:

• Summary: explain briefly the research methods, and draw attention to patterns, clusters, and outliers.

• Does/doesn't meet criteria and why

  • Summary

  • Specifics

• Cost analysis

  • Summary

  • Examples

    • Licensing, such as contract agreements and legal commitments

    • Training, such as upskilling and change management

    • Operating, such as support and maintenance

    • Metering, such as bandwidth and CPU usage

• SWOT analysis

  • Summary

  • Strengths

  • Weaknesses

  • Opportunities

  • Threats

• Internal opinions and feedback

  • Summary

  • Examples

    • By the team, ideally written by the actual person

    • From other stakeholders

    • Quality attributes a.k.a. cross-functional requirements

• External opinions and feedback

  • Summary

  • Who is providing the opinion?

  • What are other candidates you considered?

  • What are you creating?

    • Examples

      • B2B or B2C

      • external-facing or employee-only

      • desktop or mobile

      • pilot or production

      • monolith or microservices

  • How did you evaluate the candidates?

  • Why did you choose the winner?

  • What is happening since then?

    • Examples

      • How is the winner performing?

      • What % of real-world production user traffic is flowing through the winner?

      • What kinds of integrations are involved, such as with continuous delivery pipelines, content management systems, analytics and metrics, etc.?

      • Knowing what you know now, what would you advise people to do differently?

• Anecdotes

Recommendation:

• Summary

• Specifics