A diagnostic that doesn’t end in a decision is just a report that gets filed. The whole point of measuring delivery confidence is to reach one of three honest outcomes — and to know which one you’re actually looking at.
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The gaps are real but manageable. The promised benefits are still achievable within the constraints you have. You don’t need to blow anything up — you need to tighten scope, reallocate capacity, and update the risk register with the risks everyone knows about but nobody wrote down.
What it looks like in the scores: mostly 6s and up, no single dimension in freefall, and the divergence between people is narrow. If your lowest score is a 6 and the team broadly agrees, continue — deliberately, not by default.
Rescope
The original scope can’t deliver the planned benefits within current time, budget or capacity. This is the most common — and most avoided — outcome, because admitting it feels like failure. It isn’t. It’s the moment you stop paying for a definition of “done” that stopped being achievable months ago.
What it looks like: a cluster of low scores around scope clarity, timeline realism, or benefits traceability — and wide divergence, because half the room is still planning to the old scope. Rescoping means redefining what “done” is, given what you now know, and cutting what doesn’t serve the outcome.
Stop
The gap is too wide. The benefits are no longer achievable at any sensible cost. Stopping isn’t the failure outcome — it’s the most financially responsible decision available, and it’s rarer than it should be because no one wants to be the person who said it.
The most expensive project isn’t the one that fails. It’s the one that keeps going when everyone already knows it shouldn’t.
What it looks like: low scores across the board, a budget-confidence score that’s collapsed, and a quiet consensus that the room has been avoiding. Stop, recover what you can, document the lessons, and redirect the investment to something that can actually deliver.
How to make the call
- Score independently first. The decision is only as honest as the inputs. Use the Delivery Confidence Snapshot per person, not as a group.
- Read the divergence, not just the average. A 6.5 average can hide a 9 and a 3 — and that spread changes the decision.
- Define 10/10 from here. Not the original plan. What “right” looks like given today’s reality.
- Write down the evidence. Whichever path you pick, the value is that it’s defensible — to the board, to the sponsor, to yourself in six months.
You don’t have to guess which path you’re on. Run the 5-minute diagnostic — it scores the eight dimensions and shows you, with the gaps laid out, which of the three you’re actually looking at.