Decision Log & Rationale Tracker

The problem this kills

Six months after a project ships, someone asks the question that stops the room cold: "Wait - why did we decide that?" Nobody remembers. The reasoning lived in a meeting that nobody minuted, a Slack thread that scrolled away, or one person's head - and that person left. So the team relitigates a settled decision, or worse, quietly reverses it without knowing why it was made in the first place.

Decisions are the most expensive thing your team produces, and most teams store them nowhere. Action items get tracked. Risks get logged. But the decision itself - the context, the options you weighed, the reason you picked one - usually evaporates the moment the meeting ends.

This Implementation Plan kills that. You'll build a structured decision log that captures the full rationale at the moment of the decision, routes it to the decision-maker for a quick approval, and keeps it searchable forever.

What you'll build

A simple, login-protected web app where your team can:

• Capture a decision with everything that matters: the question, the context, the options considered, the chosen option, the rationale, the decision-maker, and the date.
• Link it to the project, meeting, and any affected scope items or risks.
• Send it for approval - the decision-maker (or the PM acting on their behalf) reviews the logged decision and approves it before it's committed to the official record.
• Supersede decisions - when a decision changes, flag the old one as superseded and link it to the new one, so the history stays honest.
• Search the whole log by project, decision-maker, date, or keyword - and export to CSV for status reports, audits, or your PMO.

You can capture decisions live in a meeting, or import a backlog from a notes spreadsheet to seed the log on day one.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It walks the agent - and you - through the whole build, step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the agent asks how your team actually makes and records decisions today, what your projects and meetings are called, who your decision-makers are, how big your decision backlog is, and what your messy edge cases look like (decisions that get reversed, decisions made by committee, decisions nobody wants to own). Then it reads back a short tailored spec, gets your thumbs-up, and shapes the data model, the approval rules, and every later step around your answers. You get a tool fit to your team - not a generic template.

Inside you'll find:

• The full discovery interview, written out for the agent to run.
• A clean data model for decisions, people, projects, and links to scope and risks.
• The approval workflow and the human gate.
• Superseded-decision linking and duplicate guards.
• The searchable log UI and the CSV export.
• A no-API fallback so you can build the whole thing today, even if you can't connect to your existing project system yet.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a sticky-note app. Governance is built in from the first commit:

• Login so only your team can see or touch the log.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own decisions.
• A complete audit trail - who logged it, who approved it, who superseded it, and exactly when.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate - the AI helps draft and structure the decision, but a real decision-maker reviews and approves before anything becomes the official record.
• Duplicate guards - the same decision can't be logged twice; entries are deduped on the project plus a normalized decision title.

Who it's for

Project managers, business analysts, governance and PMO leads, and project sponsors - anyone who has ever been asked "why did we decide that?" and wished they had a real answer.

You've got this. Make a folder, start your agent, and paste the first prompt.