Make decisions with confidence.
The Decision Maker tool helps you evaluate complex choices by comparing options against your custom criteria. Whether selecting a vendor, software or internal strategy, this tool provides a structured, transparent framework for making the best call.
When it’s time to make crucial decisions, having the right tools at your disposal is essential. Here’s what you gain with Decision Maker:
Whether you’re a business analyst, project manager, hiring professional, or involved in software development and procurement, Decision Maker is the game-changing tool you need to elevate your decision-making process. Don’t leave critical choices to chance—empower yourself with clear, data-driven solutions today!
Key Features:
Click “Create decision” to get started or explore past decisions in your project workspace.
Criteria: A list of requirements, facts, statements… used to judge which option is the best for a decision. They should be verbs (i.e. ability to do…, be able to…, provide after-hours support…, can scale to…)
Category: A group of criteria. All criteria must belong to a category (i.e. General, Integrations, Reports, Financial)
Importance/Priority: This indicates how important criteria will be. So if the criteria is vital to the decision then you would set that criteria importance to five. If it has little impact on the decision then you would set it to one.
Certainty: This is how much a compare service/product/outcome meets the criteria. For example. if you compare photocopiers and you had a criteria of “must support color copying”. So if a copier had full support you would have a certainty of five, if it didn’t support color copying then you would give it zero and if it had only partial support for color you may give it a two.
Scoring: This is when you add a certainty for each criteria and compare item. Once a decision has been made and moved into In Progress the decision is scored. Once scoring is completed the decision is moved to Completed.
Here are a couple of use cases for using Decision Maker
Decide which is the best SEO Tool to use for your website!
Determine past financial performance, departmental needs, and strategic priorities to decide on the budget distribution
Analyze all the customer feedback, identify common pain points, and implement solutions such as training programs or new support tool using self-service portals
Conduct a risk assessment, prioritize risks based on their likelihood and impact, and develop contingency plans.
You have an RFP to decide on an online booking/scheduling system to replace the current phone and spreadsheet-based system. Find out what you need from a system and enter it as criteria. Weigh those criteria so that the most important ones have the highest importance (5/5).
Score the criteria for each option and your decision has been made. If someone asks you why you chose that system then just show them the decision.
Trying to decide between the shortlisted applicants for a new job? Enter the criteria you are looking for where the importance is higher for the key criteria you are looking for. Input a criteria score for each applicant. Decision Maker has just empowered you to pick the best applicant.
New criteria can be added at any time during the hiring process, even after it is fully scored. Once the new criteria score is added the overall outcome is updated with the new result.
Accounting has asked you to purchase a new printer for them. You get them to create a decision with all the criteria (features) that they want and state the importance of each. The criteria of what they want is recorded clearly on the decision.
You find two printers that meet their needs, the Brother HL1210W or HP M776 printer? You score each criterion for the two printers. You can now go back to Accounting with details of the two printers and present it to them along with the decision. Accounting doesn’t need to go through tons of paper because they have the decision all filled out.
Looking at getting a new phone? Work out what features you are looking for in a phone and enter them as criteria. Adjust the importance of each criterion to suit your desires. Score the criteria for the phone and that’s it, you now know which one to get
Analyze supply chain data, identify bottlenecks, and implement strategies like just-in-time inventory or supplier consolidation
Check all the market trends, customer feedback, and competitor products to determine the target market, pricing, and promotional tactics
Each Project in Jira has a Decision Register that contains all of the decisions for that Project. You can access the Decision Register page by going to a project and selecting the Decision Register menu option.
The Decision Register is a centralized dashboard that lists all your saved decisions in a sortable, table-style layout. Each row represents a decision, with key columns like:
At the top right of the register, click the Add Decision (+) button to start a new one. You can hover over any row to reveal quick action icons:
The table is sortable by clicking column headers and searchable using the search bar at the top. This makes it easy to find, update and manage all your decisions in one view.
To begin a new evaluation:
Fields to Complete:
3. Click Save to add the decision to your register.
The new modal interface supports dropdown selectors, inline sliders, and dynamic inputs, streamlining setup and improving accuracy.
Editing an existing decision is now quick and seamless using inline controls:
This opens a modal similar to the creation interface, where you can:
Tip: Changes are auto-saved or saved via the Save button, depending on your workflow.
You no longer need to navigate to a separate page everything is handled directly from the register for speed and ease of
use
A decision is the act of making a choice or selecting an option among various alternatives. It often involves considering the potential outcomes, weighing the pros and cons, and determining the best course of action based on available information, preferences, or goals.
Decisions can range from simple, everyday choices like what to eat for breakfast to more complex and significant ones like choosing a career path or making business strategies.
Further information on these three types of decisions can be found below.
1. Basic Decisions
This is just for recording already made decisions. It doesn’t have importance since it is just a way of documenting already-made decisions.
2. General Decisions
This makes decisions based on an importance of 0-5 where 5 means that the criteria is the most important and 0 means it is the least important.
3. MoSCoW Decisions
Any question marks in a circle are the help for the related field. Hover over the question mark to get additional information about that field. The fields in the Decision Editor are as follows:
The “Add Category” and “Add Criteria” links are used to add categories and criteria. The trash can icons are used to delete the category/criteria.
To begin scoring:
For each cell, input how confident you are that an item meets the corresponding criterion.
Changes are automatically saved as you enter data.
For Basic Decision Scoring select your preferred option by clicking the radio button below. Basic decisions let you select the winning option based on your own judgment.
For General Decision Scoring you have to score them based on an importance scale of from 0-5 in each criterion
For MoSCoW Decision Scoring, evaluate each criterion by selecting Yes, No, or Maybe to determine its priority.
You can archive or delete your decisions by clicking on the three dots.
All archived decisions will be shown if you click the arrow down icon.
Note: Use Archive to hide old decisions without deleting them. Use Delete only when you’re sure you won’t need the decision again.
If issues are linked then they will be shown in those issues in a tab on the Activity section. If you go to the Issue, select the Decision Maker Pro/Lite tab under Activity, the related decisions will be shown.
