HDI — Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the screening take, and what does it cost?

The Phase 1 screening takes about 10 minutes and is free. It is a structured self-assessment: behavioural questions about how work moves through your operation, plus a handful of industry-specific indicators. You see your results immediately — the overall HDI score, the three layers, a process heatmap and your operational leak in hours — and receive them by email.

What data do you collect, and where does it go?

The screening collects your answers to operational questions, your organisation's industry and size band, and your contact email. It does not collect patient data, clinical records, financial figures or any personally identifiable information about third parties. Your data is used solely to calculate your score and prepare your results, is never shared with third parties or used for advertising, is retained for 24 months after the audit is completed, and is deleted on request at any time. GDPR consent is requested explicitly before the questionnaire starts.

Is this another "digital maturity assessment"?

No. Maturity assessments grade you against an idealised model and return a level. HDI measures one concrete, falsifiable thing: where your operation depends on specific people, and how many hours per month that dependency absorbs. Every question is behavioural — "what happens when this person is away" rather than "rate your automation on a scale of 1–5" — which is why the output is a map of fixable dependencies, not a grade.

What is a good HDI score?

Lower is better: HDI measures dependency, not capability. Scores of 0–14 (AI-Form) and 15–34 (Managed) indicate a systemised operation with deliberate, controlled dependency; 35–54 (Moderate) is common in growing companies and worth watching; 55–74 (High Risk) means specific people sit in critical paths and absences already cost real time; 75–100 (Critical) means a single unavailable person can stall the operation. Most operations that run on approvals, hand-offs and a few trusted experts land in the 50–75 range on first measurement — a high first score is normal, and it is a map of what to fix, not a verdict on the team.

How do I know if my company depends too much on key people?

The reliable signs are behavioural, not organisational: work visibly slows when one specific person is on holiday; certain approvals or release decisions can only be made by one individual; onboarding a replacement takes months because the real procedure lives in someone's head; and "quick questions" constantly interrupt the same two or three experts. If several of these sound familiar, the dependency is already costing hours every week. The HDI screening measures it in ten minutes — per process, with the monthly cost in hours.

What should we automate first?

Not the most visible process, but the most load-bearing one — the workflow where dependency on people concentrates the most hours and risk. Most failed automation projects picked their target by visibility ("we do this a lot") instead of by load ("this is what everything else waits on"). Measuring human dependency first — where work stalls without a specific person, where detection is manual, where knowledge is undocumented — produces a ranked list of entry points. That measurement is exactly what an HDI audit is for.

How do you tell whether a company is ready for AI and automation?

Readiness is less about tools and more about knowing where the operation actually depends on people. Processes with documented rules, systemic controls and shared knowledge automate quickly; processes held together by one coordinator's vigilance and an expert's memory resist automation until the dependency itself is addressed. A useful readiness check is therefore a dependency measurement: score the operation, see which processes are systemised (low HDI) and which run on people (high HDI), and sequence the AI roadmap accordingly.

Why do most automation projects fail to deliver?

Three recurring reasons:

1. The target was chosen by visibility, not by load — the automated process was never the bottleneck.
2. There was no baseline — without a before-measurement, nobody can show what improved, so the sponsor loses faith.
3. Leadership's picture differed from frontline reality — the perception gap — so the automation fit the org chart, not the actual process.

All three are measurement failures, which is why a dependency audit before the build changes the odds.

How much time do companies lose to manual coordination?

Industry studies of knowledge work consistently attribute roughly a fifth to a third of the working week to coordination overhead — searching for information, status communication, hand-offs and approvals — and regulated operations sit at the high end, because verification and documentation multiply hand-offs. The company-specific number is what matters, though: the operational leak — hours per month absorbed by coordination and dependency — varies enormously between organisations of the same size. The free screening estimates yours in ten minutes.

Would my operation survive a key employee leaving tomorrow?

Ask three questions per critical process:

1. Is there a documented, tested backup for this step?
2. Has someone else actually performed it in the last quarter?
3. Does the knowledge exist outside one person's head?

If any answer is no, the process has a bus factor of one — a single point of failure that a resignation, illness or vacation converts into delay. The screening locates every bus-factor-one step in the operation, which is the map you need before either succession planning or automation.

Why does the free result not include recommendations or money figures?

Deliberately. A 10-minute self-assessment can reliably locate what is happening and where — it cannot reliably explain why, and any currency figure derived from it would rest on cost assumptions you never agreed to. Recommendations, prioritised automation entry points, the perception gap and financial quantification on agreed assumptions are the work of the full audit, where an auditor verifies the picture with your own team. We would rather give you a smaller result that holds up than a larger theatrical one.

What happens in the full (Phase 2) audit?

The core is a structured workshop — about half a day with your key operational people, run against a calibrated instrument in which every answer is scored on behavioural anchors. Your Phase 1 self-assessment is triangulated against what the workshop reveals; the difference is itself a finding (the perception gap). You then get a live results session with leadership, followed by a written report: decoded findings, quantified losses on assumptions agreed with you, prioritised automation entry points, and an implementation plan.

How much does the full audit cost?

Pricing depends on the scope of the operation covered and is quoted after a short scoping call — request the audit from your results page or simply reply to your results email. For context on value: the closest alternative is an operational diagnostic from a consulting firm, and in regulated life sciences those start in the low six figures and routinely reach $500,000+, with months of open-ended discovery before anything actionable appears. An HDI audit costs a small fraction of that and gets to a defensible roadmap in days, because the discovery is already done by a calibrated instrument rather than by billable hours — and it ends where consulting engagements usually begin: with a prioritised implementation plan your own team has already validated.

How is this different from hiring a consultancy?

Three ways:

1. Faster. Screening in minutes, audit in days — not months of discovery.
2. Measured. The same calibrated instrument and behavioural anchors every time, so results are comparable and defensible rather than dependent on an individual consultant's impressions.
3. Scoped for action. The deliverable is a ranked list of automation entry points with an implementation plan — the end of the audit is the start of the fix, not a phase-two proposal for more analysis.

Do I need to prepare anything before the screening?

No preparation and no documents. Answer from your working knowledge of how the operation actually runs — the questionnaire is designed for how things are, not how the SOPs say they should be. If you do not know an exact figure in the KPI section, leave the default; the confidence score accounts for it, and Phase 2 verifies the details.

Who sees my results?

You do, immediately on screen and by email. On our side, results are handled by the audit team only, for the sole purpose of preparing your audit if you request one. Anonymised, aggregated patterns — never company-identifiable data — feed the published benchmarks, and only when at least three independent audits stand behind a figure.

We are not in pharma — is HDI still relevant?

Yes. The methodology was built in regulated life sciences because human dependency is most visible and most costly there, but the mechanisms it measures — manual coordination, human-only control, undocumented knowledge — exist in any operation that runs on approvals, hand-offs and expertise. Industry packs adapt the questions and benchmarks; the underlying score stays comparable.