Ten questions that separate organisations ready to transform from organisations ready to announce a transformation, covering funding, data, capability and the will to change.
Score the specific programme being proposed, not your organisation's general ambition. Fixed questions, fixed points, no AI and no storage: the score exists to be argued with in a steering meeting, not to be admired.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Transformation budgets are usually committed before anyone outside the programme has tested its foundations. A complimentary first report puts the programme in front of operators from the Global Board who have led and rescued comparable efforts.
Bring independent operator perspectives into this decisionAnswer for the programme as currently proposed, including the parts still on slides.
On these answers the ambition has outrun the organisation. Objectives, funding and operating model are still undefined, which means the programme would begin by discovering what it is for, and that is the most expensive possible place to hold that conversation.
The intent is real and pockets of preparation exist, but the score points to structural gaps: typically funding that covers only the opening phase, or change capacity that exists on slides rather than in line management. Programmes launched from here tend to deliver the technology and miss the outcomes.
Most of the foundations are laid, and the organisation has done more preparation than many that launch anyway. The gaps that remain, often data readiness or vendor dependency, are the kind that stay quiet through design and become expensive during rollout.
Objectives, funding, capability and change capacity are aligned to a degree few programmes achieve before launch. The residual risk is duration: multi-year programmes outlive the assumptions, sponsors and market conditions they were designed around, however strong the starting position.
The technology in most transformations works. What fails is everything around it: funding that evaporates in year two, executives who endorsed change everywhere except their own function, data that could not support the use cases sold to the board. This score deliberately gives technology one question out of ten, because that is roughly its share of the failure modes.
The first score, taken before approval, sets the honest baseline. Re-score at each funding gate and after any change of sponsor, because readiness decays: a reorganisation can silently undo leadership alignment, and an integrator contract can deepen vendor dependency without any decision being visibly taken. A falling score mid-programme is an early-warning signal that predates the milestone slippage.
Ten questions at 0, 5 or 10 points each, normalised to 100 and mapped to four readiness bands. No weighting is applied, which is a feature: when a programme scores well overall but takes zeros on funding and change capacity, the flat scoring makes that pattern impossible to average away.
An integrator's assessment is genuinely useful and structurally optimistic: the firm is assessing the readiness of its own future revenue. A fixed, fee-free score is the cross-check, particularly on vendor dependency, which integrator assessments rarely probe.
Use the score to sequence, not to relitigate. The lowest-scoring answers define what the first phase must fix before the spend accelerates, which is a conversation a steering committee can act on without anyone recanting.
Yes, and the data readiness and capability questions apply with extra force: AI initiatives inherit every weakness in the data estate and add new skill dependencies. If the programme is primarily an AI adoption decision, run this alongside a harder look at those two answers.