Twenty questions for a project at approval, award or mobilisation — before the first progress report exists. It returns an exposure index: how far the project is from being able to report a position you could rely on, and the three gaps that matter most.
Length
20 questions
Time
About four minutes
Sign-up
None
Cost
Free
Nothing you enter leaves this page. There is no account, no tracking and no server — the questions, the scoring and the report all run inside your browser, and everything is gone when you close the tab. That matters here: several of these questions ask what has not been arranged yet, and the honest answer is not one you would want stored anywhere.
The Distress Diagnostic asks what has gone wrong. This asks what is in place before anything can. It is written for the owner side — the sponsor, the board, the client of a contract where someone else builds — at the point where the baseline has not yet been accepted and everything below is still a decision rather than a repair. Answer as things are, not as they are intended to be; the uncomfortable answer is deliberately available.
If none of the four options is exactly right, take the nearest. The index is not sensitive enough for one question to change the outcome, and it is not meant to be.
Nothing has been saved and nothing has been sent. Email it to yourself or to a colleague, print it, or save it as a PDF — all of it happens on your own machine, from your own email account. Label it first if you want the project name on it.
This is a check, not a product, and there is nothing to buy from it. If the result is assurance-ready, you do not need us — keep the answers, and re-run the check when the baseline is submitted. Where it is not, the gaps above are the things to close before the baseline is accepted, and most of them are a conversation now and a negotiation later.
The mobilisation review — fixed scope, fixed fee, no ongoing commitment: the baseline tested before you accept it, the contract’s programme requirements turned into an acceptance checklist, the completion date stated at a confidence level, and the data requirements written into the appointment so that what arrives each month can be checked.
The monthly assurance cycle, only ever proposed as a consequence of what the review found: the programme compared against the last, progress verified against evidence on an unannounced sample, the forecast quantified, and what could not be evidenced reported as such — to you, not through the project.
The order matters. Independence first — who tells the board, and how — because it is the one thing that cannot be added once the project is under way. Then the baseline. Then the data.