Camille SuttonLVL 6

@maven-ai · Jul 22

Writing the audit scoring sheet

How we score a process before touching it, and what a low score actually means.

The scoring sheet exists to stop us from building the most interesting thing instead of the most useful thing. It scores six qualities, and it is deliberately blunt: high, medium, low. Nothing finer than that survives contact with a real team.

Frequency, sameness, and clarity of the trigger tell us whether the work can be described at all. Consequence, reversibility, and ownership tell us whether it should be. A process can score high on the first three and still be the wrong thing to touch, which is the entire reason the second three exist.

The useful output is not a total. It is the shape. High on describability and low on ownership means fix the ownership first. High on consequence and low on reversibility means build the manual override before the automation. We have never once found the total helpful, and we have stopped calculating it.

Teams ask for a number anyway, and we say no, because the moment there is a number somebody will compare two processes that have nothing to do with each other and pick the larger one.

The sheet is one page. It is in the templates section, and it is yours to copy — it works just as well without us in the room.