The CDI workshop toolkit

What the toolkit covers

The toolkit is four pages for running a CDI self-assessment with a delivery team. The first is the canvas: the six dimensions, each with its diagnostic question and a descriptor at every level from L1 Absent to L5 Substantive, plus boxes for the most mature dimension, the biggest gap, and one top priority for the next ninety days, owned by one person. The second is a facilitator’s companion, the third a set of specimen profiles, and the fourth a grid of 90-day action patterns giving one concrete move per level transition on each dimension.

Its stance is that the session is a diagnostic rather than a workshop, and that score totals tell less than score shapes.

Key points

• Invite five people from cross-functional perspectives: delivery, security, architecture, operations and one engineer in the day-to-day. Send the blank canvas twenty-four hours ahead, and ask people to read the dimensions but not score until the room is together.
• The sixty-minute protocol runs Frame, Score in silence, Compare, Diagnose, Commit and Close. Each person scores all six dimensions independently first, because the disagreements are the data.
• Four profile shapes are read differently: Flat & Low, Spiky, High & Flat, and Climbing. High & Flat is the governance theatre risk, so every L4 claim gets stress-tested for the evidence that makes it real rather than documented.
• Three specimen teams make the point. The Theatrical Team totals 22 / 30 and the Balanced Team 18 / 30, yet the Balanced Team is the safer team to ship behind.
• The action patterns run from getting on the board to closing the gap. The first three transitions can be project-managed. The L4 to L5 move requires culture, repetition and time.
• The session closes by scheduling the next assessment: same room, ninety days. Without that next data point, the team has had a conversation, not an assessment.