Key Takeaway: A pre-qualification scorecard that measures organizational willingness, not technical capability.
The worst thing in consulting is firing a client. Not the revenue loss -- the human cost. Months of work that produced nothing. A team demoralized by building something that will never ship. A relationship that ends with both sides telling different stories about what went wrong. I've been on both sides of this conversation, and it never gets easier. This scorecard exists so you never have to have it. The inverse: pre-qualify so hard that the soured engagement never starts. Do the hard conversation before the contract, not after. It takes courage to turn away revenue. But a soured engagement costs more than the deal was ever worth -- in reputation, in team morale, and in the months your best people spent on something that was dead on arrival.
Most companies fail it. Not because the technology is immature — because their organizations are. Every company that failed this scorecard had capable engineers and reasonable budgets. What they didn't have was someone willing to tell the VP of Operations that her team's workflow was getting rebuilt.
Five dimensions, scored 1-5
Executive Sponsorship (highest weight). One named person with authority, budget, and willingness to spend political capital. Not a committee. Not "the leadership team is excited." The diagnostic: "Who signs off on workflow changes affecting more than one department?" If the answer involves more than one name, deduct a point. If the answer is "we'll figure that out as we go," walk away. I've seen three engagements die because the sponsor had authority to start but not to finish — innovation budget requiring quarterly re-approval, VP promoted to a different division mid-project, CEO who surfaced "concerns" six weeks into implementation because the CTO hadn't socialized upward.
Data Access (not data quality). Quality can be improved during the engagement. Access is a governance and political problem no consulting engagement solves. The test: can the team get read access to production data within the first two weeks? Not sanitized samples. Not last quarter's export. Production data with schemas and context. I give this a two-week hard deadline. If you can't get data access in 14 days, the organizational antibodies are stronger than the executive sponsor's authority.
Willingness to Change Workflows — where most companies fail. They want AI to make current processes faster, not different. The value is structural — replacing judgment loops with automated ones, collapsing sequential processes into parallel ones. The diagnostic: "Are you willing to eliminate roles based on findings?" Companies that will actually change point to specifics. Companies that won't give you strategy-deck language about "augmenting our team." When I hear "augment," I mentally deduct two points.
Technical Team Quality (not size). Three excellent engineers implement AI faster than thirty mediocre ones. I assess by talking to the technical team directly, not their managers: what's your deployment pipeline? How do you monitor model performance? What was the last production incident and how did you handle it? Confident, specific answers mean the team is real. Buzzword soup means the team is a slide deck.
Timeline Expectations. Realistic: 90 days to working POC, another 90 to production, another 90 to organizational adoption. Companies insisting on "quick wins in month one" will optimize for demos over systems. A demo that impresses the board but can't handle production data is worse than no demo — it creates false confidence and makes the real work harder to fund.
Total below 18: no-go. 18-22: conditional. Above 22: green.
This scorecard loses deals. Good. The companies that score above 22 close faster, ship to production, and become references. The ones below 18 would have become the engagements you warn new hires about. Technical readiness has engineering solutions. Organizational readiness has only one solution: a leader who decides the change is happening and makes it stick. No scorecard can give a company that. But it can tell you whether they already have it.