Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Decision process
The usual way a manager of managers intervenes in a cross-team technical decision. Before any opinion is issued, they install the criteria, the evidence required, a named decider and a date, so that the organisation keeps the capability.
Where the standard develops it
- TJ-4Technical credibility and interventionStaying close enough to judge, and knowing when to step in.
- TJ-1Evaluating architectural decisions and their organisational consequencesTrade-offs, reversibility, and who has to coordinate because of this.
Related terms
- Architecture review forum
- A standing forum where significant designs get cross-team scrutiny early.
- One-way door
- A decision that is hard to reverse and so deserves deliberation and senior involvement.
- Executive docket
- The explicit, short list of technical decisions an executive owns personally because they cannot be separated from company strategy.
- Intervention threshold
- Step into a technical decision when being wrong would be costly and hard to reverse (one-way doors, safety, security, data integrity, customer impact in flight).
- Inverse Conway manoeuvre
- Designing the organisation to produce the architecture you want, on the basis that the system will mirror the organisation's structure either way.
- Mirroring hypothesis
- The empirically tested form of Conway's observation.
- Strangler pattern
- Replacing a legacy system incrementally by growing the new capability around it and routing traffic away piece by piece until the old system can be retired.
- Structured sensing
- How an executive keeps their technical judgment current.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Decision process. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.decision-process). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/decision-process