Is your project moving, or just professionally circling?
Twenty honest questions, five minutes, one straight answer: where your work is losing momentum, and the first move to fix it.
Most stuck work does not look stuck. It looks busy.
The meeting produces another meeting
Everyone talks, everyone nods, and nobody leaves with a decision that can survive the room.
The blockers are wrapped in fog
People say legal, data, budget or governance is blocking progress, but the real Condition to Proceed is not named.
The work has activity, not proof
There are actions, updates and decks. What is missing is evidence that the project can actually move.
Score your project against the five VOLTS moves.
The scorecard gives you a practical read on where your project is losing momentum. It is not a maturity model, a corporate horoscope or a new excuse to create a steering group.
Answer each question honestly. At the end you get a score, a diagnosis, and the one move to start with — chosen from your weakest area, not a generic checklist.
Diagnose the drift.
For each question, choose No, Partly or Yes. Be honest — the useful answer is not the polite one. Each section opens the next as you complete it.
Your project score
Complete the scorecard to see your diagnosis.
Score band
Your summary will appear here.
Your weakest move
Fix it on the real work.
Send me the scorecard pack
Get the printable PDF Scorecard plus the 3-things-to-watch-this-week guide. Two fields. No job title. No form-shaped hostage situation.
You’ll get the PDF immediately. The welcome email should arrive shortly after with the PDF and three common scorecard patterns to watch this week.
How can I help my team make better decisions and move important work forward?
The scorecard is designed for exactly that question. It helps you identify whether the work is stuck because the decision is unclear, the blockers are foggy, the proof step is missing, the cadence is weak or the story does not travel.
Start by diagnosing where the work is stuck. The Stuck Project Scorecard helps teams identify whether the problem is unclear decisions, hidden blockers, weak proof, poor cadence or a story that does not travel. From there, you can use the VOLTS Method to focus the next move.
The Stuck Project Scorecard is a practical diagnostic tool for project drift. It scores work across five areas: Visualise & Align, Own the Obstacles, Launch & Learn, Track & Tune, and Story & Spark.
A stalled project usually needs a clearer decision, named blockers, a smaller proof step, a stronger cadence and a story people can repeat. The scorecard shows which of those is weakest, then points you towards the right VOLTS move.
If the same topics keep coming back, meetings feel productive but nothing changes, or nobody can repeat the decision afterwards, the work may be stuck in alignment theatre. The scorecard helps expose that pattern. You can also read the guide to alignment theatre.
Start with your weakest VOLTS score. If the decision score is low, write a Decision Sentence; if proof is weak, create a small Proof Plan. If you want it fixed on your own stuck project rather than in theory, the Ship It Audit is a half-day that does exactly that. If the whole team needs to learn the method, the VOLTS Workshop is built for that.
The scorecard is part of the VOLTS ecosystem behind Just F*cking Ship It by Matthew Barrington-Packer, the VOLTS Method book for turning stuck meetings into decisions, and decisions into shipped outcomes.
If the score stings a bit, good. It found something useful.
The scorecard names the problem. Fixing it on your real, stuck work is what the Ship It Audit is for — half a day, your actual project, outputs you can use on Monday.
