This article contains detailed explanations of the Decisions entity available in PPO:
- What is a decision?
- Accessing the Decisions entity;
- Standard Configuration;
- Customising the Decisions entity;
- Decisions Reporting.
What is a decision ?
Decision making is simply the process of making a choice between a number of options and committing to a future course of action. Those decisions then need to be logged on the project, so they can be referred back to.
Why would you want to record decisions in a log?
On a long project, project managers, sponsors and team members make a lot of decisions and somehow you need to keep track of everything that has been agreed. A decision log can help with this. It is simply a list of all the key decisions made on the project.
A decision log is better than keeping discussions on email or in a spreadsheet. All the answers you need and the justification about why those decisions were taken are all in one place and is also searchable. The decision log can solve many project disputes, especially when the team is working on a project that involves changes to strategy or approach or has a long duration.
It is also useful to be able to go back months or years after the completion of a project and be able to see what the reason or justification was for a particular decision.
When is decision tracking done?
There is no specific time or best time to capture decisions. They should be logged during project progress meetings and as they happen. Decisions are reviewed during the project and as and when needed.
How does PPO support decision tracking?
A Decisions entity is configured by default in PPO and can be used to capture and track decisions. There are also some standard reports that are available to support the process of decision tracking.
Accessing the Decisions entity
The Decisions entity can be accessed from the from the Project Menu Item. If you do not see the Decisions entity, make sure that the entity has been enabled on your instance and that your user group has been granted access to the entity.
For more information about setting up user group access rights, read the following knowledge base article.
Standard Configuration
The screenshot below shows the standard configuration of the Decisions entity.
Customising the Decisions entity
Should you wish to configure the decisions entity to align to your own methodology, access the following knowledge base article which will guide you through the process of adding or updating existing data fields. If you also need assistance in the process, feel free to log a support call and the PPO Support team will gladly assist you.
Decisions Reporting
The decision reports available in PPO will assist the executives and project managers to track and monitor the decisions that have been made on the project. They are:
- Decision Detail Report - the report shows a data dump of all the data fields available on the decisions entity. It is only available in a datasheet view.
- Decisions Report – the report shows a summary of the status of all the decisions on the project.
For more information on the report explanations access the following knowledge base article.