Free Tool · Governance

Platform governance scorecard

Twelve questions across demand, change, release discipline and ownership — the four things that determine whether today's decisions are still legible in three years.

Platform governance is usually discussed as documentation and boards. It is more usefully understood as four mechanisms: how demand arrives, how change to the platform itself is recorded, whether releases happen on a schedule, and who is actually accountable.

Where those four are unmanaged, an instance can run perfectly well for years and then become a recovery project the moment two people leave. This scores the mechanisms, not the paperwork.

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Demand

Ungoverned demand is the single largest source of platform debt. Everything else on this page is downstream of it.

  1. There is one route by which new platform work is requested, and it is used.

  2. Requests are assessed against a stated principle, not only against available capacity.

  3. Someone is empowered to say no, and has done so in the last quarter.

Change to the platform itself

Configuration drift is not caused by bad administrators. It is caused by nobody recording why a decision was made.

  1. Architectural decisions are recorded somewhere that survives the person who made them.

  2. You could explain why any given customisation exists without asking its author.

  3. There is an agreed standard for when to configure, when to customise, and when to decline.

Release discipline

An instance that cannot be upgraded on schedule is an instance that will eventually be recovered rather than upgraded.

  1. Upgrades happen on a schedule rather than when someone finds time.

  2. A regression pack exists and is maintained alongside the configuration.

  3. Update sets or application repositories are named so a stranger could audit them.

Ownership

Most governance failures are not process failures. They are an absence of a named person with the authority to decide.

  1. One named person is accountable for the platform, distinct from whoever administers it.

  2. Each major module has an owner on the business side, not only in IT.

  3. When two owners disagree, there is a defined path to a decision within a defined time.

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Send us the output. We will say what we would fix first, what we would leave alone, and whether you need outside help at all — including when you do not.

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