Master the decision-making process: A successful team's comprehensive guide

The importance of effective decision-making

From projects to planning, making effective decisions takes practice, and sets the foundation for your success. While small, quick decisions may allow some flexibility, big-impact decisions are harder to reverse — so being able to successfully weigh options, risks, and opportunities is a muscle that needs to be flexed and refined.

Regardless of which techniques you choose and how you represent your leadership style, it’s also important to gain buy-in from your whole team and make sure you’ve set up clear processes that you can replicate efficiently in the future.

Decision-making techniques, styles, and approaches

Knowing your decision-making style doesn’t preclude you from making informed decisions. While we all have a level of personal and professional intuition to trust, effective decision-making is backed up by analysis, research, and fact. A PwC survey of senior executives found that data-driven organizations are three times more likely to see improvements in decision-making than those who rely less on data.

There are countless decision-making models that drive informed choices, and finding the right technique comes down to your team makeup and your leadership style. Many teams prefer a SWOT analysis, which outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the decision to accurately gauge benefits and risks.

Decision-making techniques, styles, and approaches

Knowing your decision-making style doesn’t preclude you from making informed decisions. While we all have a level of personal and professional intuition to trust, effective decision-making is backed up by analysis, research, and fact. A PwC survey of senior executives found that data-driven organizations are three times more likely to see improvements in decision-making than those who rely less on data.

There are countless decision-making models that drive informed choices, and finding the right technique comes down to your team makeup and your leadership style. Many teams prefer a SWOT analysis, which outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the decision to accurately gauge benefits and risks.

1. End-to-end agile project management: Jira Software

Jira Software facilitates breaking complex projects into manageable sprints, so businesses can deliver continuous value to their customers through iterative development and project management. Whether tracking sprint tasks, customer issues, or bugs, Jira gives project managers the tools to map dependencies, identify roadblocks, and remain always current on status.

Jira Software natively integrates with Jira Work Management, allowing project managers to merge tasks from other areas, such as marketing, for a holistic view of the project. This allows teams to work the way they are accustomed to while standardizing project management across the company.

Combining Jira Software and Confluence creates a seamless end-to-end project management solution, enabling real-time collaboration, documentation, and efficient sharing of supporting information. Everything related to the project, such as roadmaps, specifications, user stories, customer input, and more remains accessible and discoverable during and after the project.   

Together, Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Work Management provide a complete solution with a variety of Jira and project management templates to help teams get started immediately.

While Jira Software is often used by software development teams, it’s also used across a variety of disciplines, including marketing, finance, legal, and more.

2. Cross-team visibility: Jira Work Management

Coordinating projects across multiple teams, like development and marketing, often highlights each discipline's unique work approach. Good project managers don't impose rigid structures but instead work within each team's processes.

Jira Work Management synchronizes tasks across the company to encompass all teams involved with a collaborative approach. Such work management solutions allow project managers to identify dependencies between business areas, manage resource allocation, and track tasks related to the project in one visual workflow. This engages and motivates the broader team for faster and more accurate results.

3. Knowledge management: Confluence

Every project generates supporting information that team members need to meet the goals. User stories, requirements, product specifications, and external details like integration information should all be easily accessible and linked to the project.

Confluence provides a central repository that brings knowledge management into the product development lifecycle.

4. Real-time communication: Slack

Slack offers instant access to team members all over the world for quick and efficient interactions. During customer meetings, it empowers team members to gather updates, ask questions, and find information without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

Slack also supports channels, which are groups of teams working on similar tasks or with similar skills, to enhance communication and maintain focus. Many remote teams find that Slack keeps them connected, fostering a sense of collaboration similar to working in the same office.

Slack integrates with Jira Software, allowing teams to set notifications on issues and tasks, tag team members, and capture discussions.

5. Project collaboration: Confluence

Confluence supports easy collaboration in one central repository for the project’s supporting information. During discovery, this includes customer feedback, roadmaps, and requirements. Once in progress, the product specification is critical for keeping the team focused. After the fact, during the project retrospective, the team can capture wins and identify opportunities for improvement.

With Confluence, team members can collaborate in real-time by creating and editing pages, adding images, code, and tables, and tagging others. Project managers can also link Jira tasks to Confluence documents, ensuring a single source of truth.

6. Task management automation: Jira Software

Real-time visual status updates make Jira Software an effective tool for task management, and with Jira automation, teams can focus on important things instead of busy work.

Its built-in templates allow teams to easily identify repetitive tasks and automate them. Anyone on the agile team can sync tasks across projects and products because it doesn't require coding. Jira automation also integrates with commonly used tools such as Slack, Bitbucket, and GitHub.

7. Online whiteboard and visual planning: Confluence

Confluence whiteboards give teams a collaborative space for brainstorming, visualizing, and turning ideas into actions in real-time or asynchronously. Features such as stamps, votes, timers, and more make it easy to share ideas and make collaborative decisions, even for remote teams. Teams can also connect decisions to Jira issues and other project areas without leaving the whiteboard.

8. Prioritization and roadmapping: Jira Product Discovery

Before teams can develop solutions, they must first define the product strategy and roadmap. Jira Product Discovery is a centralized tool for capturing and prioritizing ideas, aligning stakeholders, and building the roadmap.

With collaborative idea generation, teams can prioritize ideas based on impact versus effort, which supports Scrum activities such as backlog refinement and sprint planning. Jira Product Discovery includes templates for end-to-end product development, including strategy and roadmaps, requirements, and task tracking—all of which are customizable.

9. Async video messaging: Loom

Asynchronous communication allows team members to stay focused on the work until a natural break is available to receive updates and new information. Project managers are careful to update the team when it makes the most sense for each member. 

Loom lets project managers turn non-urgent information into videos that team members can fit into their own schedules. With today’s geographically dispersed teams, it allows everyone to remain informed, no matter what time zone they work in.

Steps you should take in the decision-making process

The first step you need to take when making a decision is identifying the problem your team needs to solve. Create a Confluence page where you can visualize the problem and who is responsible for overcoming it. Having the problem clearly spelled out will help ensure everyone understands what decision they need to make and why. What is the impact of the problem? What are your goals that will confirm your solution is a success?

Then, break down the issue. Gather information and data that defines what has caused the problem or is preventing a solution. This can include market research, company data, personal insights, and trending news. Build a table that outlines the risks and benefits of potential solutions to prepare your team ahead of time.

Encourage your team to review that outline and provide feedback early on, so they can identify any missing gaps or obstacles before you flesh out the problem. They may also be able to contribute to your research and provide further insights you didn’t consider.

Evaluate your team’s options and use a framework to make a decision. You may need a group effort or further evaluation, which is where your framework comes into play. You may find that the original framework you proposed — like a SWOT analysis – isn’t thorough enough for the solution you’ll need. Encourage your team to propose the right framework that will help with transparency in the decision and will also make their workload clear.

Once you’ve made the decision, work through project management tools like Trello or Jira Work Management to implement it, test it, and monitor it. Continue to document your progress along the way in Confluence so you can refer to it in the future to replicate or iterate your performance.

Popular decision-making frameworks

DACI: Use this framework to work with a team to come to group decisions together, identifying roles within the process including Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed individuals. Use data and background knowledge to help support the decision.

Problem framing: Work with your team to identify problem statements that outline one concise solution to the problem in a digestible and collaborative manner. This helps focus on understanding and defining the problem while you align your team on approach. Then you can assemble a select group of stakeholders to settle on the right decision.

Trade-offs: Sometimes making the right decision means making compromises. What will you trade-off for the benefit of the right decision? Work with your team to identify constraints, blockers, and priorities before you kick off the project so you come prepared with decisions before the obstacles happen.

OKRs: Make your decisions with an objective in mind. OKRs are designed for continuous growth and can function as a “north star” that keeps you on course as you make individual decisions during a project.

Decision-making in Confluence

Regardless of which model you pick, your team can work together to both build and document your decision-making framework within Confluence. We have templates for DACI, SWOT analysis, a design decision template, a voting table, and more

Decision-making in Confluence

Regardless of which model you pick, your team can work together to both build and document your decision-making framework within Confluence. We have templates for DACI, SWOT analysis, a design decision template, a voting table, and more