Is your IT actually slow, or is the business setting it up to fail?

A 12-question, 5-minute self-assessment for IT leaders and the executives who rely on them. By Radu Spataru.

In thirty years across IT in companies of every size, the same three structural problems show up again and again under the surface of "our IT is slow" - and almost never the one that is being blamed.

This assessment is the diagnostic I use, in twelve questions, before I take a discovery call. Five minutes of your time, taken honestly, and you will know two things you probably did not know clearly before you started:

How structurally healthy IT is in your company today, on a 0 - 36 scale, with four labelled bands from functional to critical.
Which of the three usual culprits is dominant in your situation - process, people, or alignment - and the three things you can do about it this week.

It is built to be useful whether you are the CIO doing the assessment yourself, or the CEO/CFO doing it on your IT team and then handing it to your CIO to take independently.

The gap between the two scores is itself a useful diagnostic.

what you'll get

1. The 12 questions, grouped into three sections. Delivery and process · People, hiring and bonus · Business-IT alignment. Four questions each, scored 0 - 3. Take it on paper, on a tablet, or back-of-an-envelope on a flight. No login, no form to fill, no scoring engine to game.

2. A scoring rubric and four result bands. Functional / Under strain / On fire / Critical. Each band tells you what stage you are at and what is true of the situations I see at that stage. No vague advice - specific, situational, written for someone who is in the room when the decisions get made.

3. Three pages of "what to do this week." One page for each of the three culprits, depending on which one scored highest in your case. Three concrete actions, written for the next seven days, that you can do without budget approval. The point is not to fix everything - the point is to start the muscle of evidence-based conversation with the business.

If your total comes out 9 or higher, a 30-minute call with me is probably worth your time. We use your scores as the starting point - no rebuilding context, no slide deck, just where you actually are and what to do about it. If I cannot help you, I will tell you within the first 10 minutes, and point you to who can.

Is your IT actually slow, or is the business setting it up to fail?

Get the assessment (PDF)

what you'll get

This website uses cookies.