A structured diagnostic that evaluates your organisation's capacity to realise measurable value from AI-assisted software development. Based on the DORA AI Capabilities Model. Enhanced with Spec-Driven Development methodology.
Book a Discovery Call90% of technology professionals now use AI at work. Most organisations have invested in licences. But DORA's 2025 research — based on nearly 5,000 professionals — reveals a critical truth: AI adoption alone has only a modest impact on performance. Without the right foundations, you're amplifying dysfunction, not delivery.
AI is an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organisations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones. The greatest returns come not from the tools themselves, but from investing in the foundational systems that enable success.
The assessment evaluates your organisation against the seven foundational capabilities identified by DORA's research as proven amplifiers of AI's positive impact on performance.
Ambiguity creates risk. A clear policy provides the psychological safety needed for effective experimentation.
The benefits of AI are significantly amplified by high-quality, accessible, and unified internal data.
Connecting AI to your internal documentation and codebases moves it from a generic assistant to a specialised expert.
As AI increases the velocity of change, version control becomes the critical safety net that enables confident experimentation.
This discipline counteracts the risk of AI generating large, unstable changes, ensuring that speed translates to better product performance.
A focus on user needs ensures AI-accelerated teams are moving quickly in the right direction. Without it, AI adoption actively harms team performance.
A platform provides the automated, secure pathways that allow AI's benefits to scale across the organisation.
DORA identifies the gap. SDD fills it. Specification quality is the shifted bottleneck in AI-native development — AI can only be as good as the spec it receives.
Four phases. Discrete deliverables at each stage. A clear narrative arc from diagnosis to action.
Capability survey across all seven DORA dimensions. Stakeholder interviews. Team skills self-assessment sessions. Map your team archetype.
Value stream mapping workshop. Identify where work is waiting, not working. Specification quality audit. Find the real bottlenecks.
Facilitated team workshop. Impact/effort mapping. Ruthless prioritisation. Commit to a first step with ownership and success criteria.
Define leading indicators (capability maturity) and lagging indicators (DORA outcomes). Establish baselines. Build the measurement playbook.
Every assessment produces a set of actionable deliverables. This is a roadmap, not a slide deck.
10–15 page report for leadership: current state, key findings, prioritised recommendations, and the business case for investment.
Visual representation of capability maturity across all seven dimensions, mapped to DORA team archetypes.
Current-state and future-state maps with process time, wait time, and flow efficiency for each step.
Team skills heatmap with identified capability gaps and recommended training priorities.
Maturity assessment of how work is specified and communicated to AI tools, with SDD-informed recommendations.
Impact/effort mapped initiatives with owners, success criteria, and a committed first step.
Leading and lagging indicators, collection methods, target cadence, ownership, and baseline values.
A follow-up review to evaluate progress on committed actions and recalibrate priorities.
You've invested in AI tooling. Adoption is patchy. You need evidence-based guidance on where to invest next and a framework to justify that investment to the board.
Your platform is the distribution layer for AI's benefits. This assessment shows where your platform is amplifying value — and where it's creating bottlenecks.
Your teams are using AI but results are inconsistent. You need a diagnostic that names the gaps and a workshop that gets your team aligned on what to fix first.
This assessment is grounded in the 2025 DORA AI Capabilities Model — the most comprehensive study of AI in software development to date. Every capability, every outcome measure, every team archetype is validated through rigorous research.
30 years in enterprise technology. 14 professional certifications including GitLab ×9 and GitHub ×4. Currently writing Spec Driven Development: AI-Native Software Engineering. Published author of AI Immigrants. Remote-first. Budapest · Dublin · London.
If this sounds right for your organisation, get in touch. We’ll talk through the fit, the scope, and what works for your context. No pitch deck. Just a conversation.
You can also reach me directly at [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn.