Options papers stall when the recommendation arrives late or the options are variants of one choice. This decision memo template opens with the recommendation and the decision date, then gives the background, the criteria, the options side by side, an assessment with weighted scores, and a next-steps plan with owners. Each page is built for an executive who needs the answer in the first lines and an auditor who reads the reasons months later.

The sample is for Eastlake Digital, a fictional digital team choosing a booking service to replace a platform that loses vendor support in March 2028. It scores three options and a do-nothing baseline on five tests, and the recommended option scores 74 out of 100 against 62 for the next. Replace the options, criteria, weights and costs with your own, and keep the scores and the revisit date in the decision log.