Service 01 · Diagnostic
The Engineering Velocity Audit
A two-week diagnostic for engineering leaders who want to know, with evidence, why their team isn’t shipping as fast as it should.
Why it exists
Three questions, answered clearly
Engineering organisations slow down as they grow. Identifying the actual cause, and ranking the dozen things that might be the problem, is hard from inside the system. The audit answers three questions:
- Where are you today, measured against the rest of the industry
- Why are you there, traced to specific capabilities in your delivery system
- What to do about it, with a prioritised roadmap and quick wins for the next month
What it assesses
Eight capability areas, end to end
Everything between an engineer starting a change and that change running safely in production. Each is scored against a defined rubric and backed by evidence.
Source control & integration
How code moves from a developer’s machine into the trunk
CI pipeline health
The build and test feedback loop
Test strategy
Where confidence in releases actually comes from
Deployment mechanics
The act of getting code to production
Environment management
The dev, staging, and production substrate
Observability & rollback
What happens after deploy
Architecture & coupling
Structural drag on delivery
Workflow & cognitive load
The human system around the technical one
How it works
Two weeks, fixed scope
Week one: Discovery
- Kickoff with the engineering leadership team
- Six to ten structured interviews across roles
- Read-only access to source control, CI/CD, deploy logs, and incident records
- Quantitative measurement of the DORA outcome metrics
Week two: Synthesis & delivery
- Capability scoring and pattern identification
- Findings connected to business outcomes
- 90-minute readout with the leadership team
- Roadmap and quick-wins list left with the team
What you get
- A written report (15 to 25 pages): executive summary, metrics, scorecard, themes, and roadmap
- A capability scorecard across eight dimensions, scored against an anchored rubric, with evidence
- A prioritisation matrix plotting recommendations on impact vs effort
- A roadmap across three horizons: quick wins (0 to 30 days), focused improvements (30 to 90), strategic investments (90+)
- A 90-minute readout session walking leadership through the findings and decisions
Investment
Fixed fee, scoped to organisation size. Typical range £8,000 to £15,000, paid 50% on engagement and 50% on delivery.
No additional charges for UK travel, scheduling, or follow-up questions in the four weeks after the readout.
Book a callWho it’s for
Engineering leaders running 10 to 100 engineers
That’s the band where delivery friction becomes significant but focused intervention still produces measurable results within a quarter.
- SaaS and product engineering teams, and scale-ups feeling the drag of growth
- Leaders new in role who need an evidence base for their first 90 days
- Teams where the board or CEO has started asking pointed questions about delivery pace
- Organisations preparing for a step-change: a new product line, expansion, or acquisition
Less strong fits, worth flagging honestly: very early-stage startups under ten engineers, agencies, and teams that have already decided the problem and want validation.