MTCC: packaging a consultant's business diagnostic into a self-serve platform

A framework, modelled as data

The core move was treating the consultant's framework as structured. Four domains (Effective Leadership, Customer Focus, Organisational Health, Operational Resilience) fan out into twelve categories of Likert questions, each with weighting, optional reverse-scoring, and narrative guidance for every score band. Modelling all of it as data means MTCC can build and version diagnostics, import a whole question bank from a spreadsheet, and run three assessment types (business, ISO 9001 and sentiment) through the same engine, with no code changes.

Publishing is a gate, not a button

A diagnostic missing guidance for a score band still sends perfectly well, and then produces a report with holes in it. So publishing runs a readiness check first: naming and version, every question present and worded, domains and categories joined up, scoring weights and reverse-scoring flags valid, and report coverage confirmed for every domain the circumplex will chart. Level narratives fail as advisory rather than blocking, because a question can legitimately fall back to the standard 1 to 5 maturity scale. Publishing then freezes the question set, so a result recorded against a version always means that exact set of questions.

Built so people actually finish it

A diagnostic delivers nothing if people abandon it halfway. The runner is a single tokenised link (mobile-first, designed against WCAG AA patterns, paginated with a progress indicator) that autosaves and resumes, so a busy operator can answer a few questions, close the tab, and pick up later on the same link. Submit once, done.

Delivery you can chase

Sending is the part that quietly decides whether a diagnostic ever gets finished. Invitations go out one at a time or as a group, where a whole organisation is added at once and each person receives their own personalised link with a chosen lifetime. Every invitation then carries a visible lifecycle: invited, accepted by the email provider, completed, or expired, each with resend in reach. The dashboard rolls the same data up into what needs attention now, including links expiring in the next seven days and invitations still waiting on the consultant.

From answers to advice

The report is where it becomes a consultant. It opens on a circumplex (radar) of category scores, calls out the top-three strengths and bottom-three risks, and for each category surfaces the narrative tied to the achieved band, so a leader reads guidance rather than numbers. It prints to a clean A4 PDF and exports to CSV. Underneath, a shared, tested scoring engine keeps the admin view, the report, and the export in agreement.