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High-Stakes Tech Project Risk Scorecard.

Ten questions. Five-point scale. Five minutes. Score your project the way a senior delivery operator would before a rescue conversation. No email required, no follow-up sequence — the result is in your browser, yours to share.

Most projects do not fail in delivery. They fail in the gap between what was promised and what is being built. The scorecard makes the gap visible.

  1. 01

    Commercial pressure is named. Everyone on the project — engineering, sales, leadership — can state the same one-sentence answer to "what does shipping this unlock for the business?"

    1 = nobody can state it · 5 = everyone gives the same answer

  2. 02

    Scope and deadline are pricable. If we asked the team for a credible delivery date for the original scope, we would get a single number, not a range.

    1 = wide range or "we don't know" · 5 = single number with confidence

  3. 03

    Decision authority is in the room. Trade-off decisions can be made on a single call, not escalated through a committee that meets in three weeks.

    1 = every change needs committee · 5 = decisions made on the call

  4. 04

    Critical-path suppliers are confirmed, not assumed. Every external dependency (hardware, third-party API, data feed, contractor) has a written delivery date and a fallback if it slips.

    1 = "they said they would" · 5 = signed and tracked

  5. 05

    The architecture is documented and current. A new senior engineer joining tomorrow could understand the system from the existing diagrams and docs, not by interviewing the team.

    1 = lives in heads only · 5 = current diagrams and ADRs

  6. 06

    Customer expectation matches build plan. What the customer believes they are getting at handover is identical to what is on the engineering backlog. Both have seen the same document recently.

    1 = sales deck and backlog disagree · 5 = customer signed the same scope last week

  7. 07

    The team is not saturated. The named engineers on this project are not also the named engineers on three other simultaneous fires. They have visible bandwidth for unexpected work.

    1 = same five names on every priority · 5 = focused team with slack

  8. 08

    The first shippable slice is identified. We know what the smallest credible version looks like and which week it would land. It is not the whole project, and the team agrees on what it is.

    1 = "everything has to ship together" · 5 = MVP defined and dated

  9. 09

    Failure modes have a written response. If the integration partner pulls out, the data feed disappears or the lead engineer leaves, there is a documented next move. Not a heroic recovery.

    1 = no plan B · 5 = written runbook for top three risks

  10. 10

    Operability is owned. Someone is named for the day after handover — who runs the system, who fixes it, who pays for the support. Not "TBD".

    1 = nobody owns the day after · 5 = ops, support and budget assigned

Answer all 10 questions to see your score.

How to read the score.

10–20: Healthy. The fundamentals are in place. Watch the lowest-scoring rows — those are where the next surprise comes from.

21–30: Watch list. The project ships if nothing else goes wrong. Anything that does go wrong will be expensive. Tighten the bottom three rows now.

31–40: Risk register. The project is unlikely to land on its current trajectory. The conversation is no longer "how do we accelerate" — it is "what do we change about the plan." Get a senior outside read before the next milestone meeting.

41–50: Rescue territory. The gap between the plan and reality is now bigger than the team can close from inside. The cost of fixing this internally is almost certainly higher than the cost of bringing in someone whose only job is to land it. That is what we do.

Scored 30+?

Bring the score to a free Teams call.

We will tell you whether your project is recoverable as-is, what the smallest credible delivery slice looks like, and whether Thrucible is the right consultancy for it — or who you should be talking to instead.

Book a free Teams call →