Routing
The score names the problem. Routing decides who fixes it.
A measurement that stops at a diagnosis leaves the hardest part undone. Most companies can act on the fix themselves. Where they cannot, someone has to decide what this company needs, who should provide it, and whether it happened. In most institutions that decision is made by whoever is nearest, on the day, from memory.
Routing is the step that turns a score into support. It is also the step that makes movement attributable, because you cannot report what an intervention changed unless you recorded which intervention it was.
Not everything needs a provider
Routing is one of two paths out of a diagnosis, and it is the smaller one.
Most root causes have a fix the company can carry out itself. It receives three specific actions, each with an owner, a date and the evidence that would show it worked, and it can act on them the same afternoon. That is the loop the instrument is built around: measure, act, measure again. It scales, because it needs nobody’s diary.
Routing is for the rest: where the fix genuinely needs a person, where the company will not get there alone, or where an institution wants to deploy provision it already pays for. The diagnosis decides which of the two applies.
That distinction protects your budget. Not every company in a cohort consumes support, and you can see how many did, of what kind, and how many resolved it themselves.
The gap this closes
Most people holding the score cannot fix what it finds.
A programme manager at a combined authority, a relationship manager at a bank, an enterprise team at a university: all of them can read a result and understand it. None of them is a commercial practitioner, and none of them should have to be.
They do not need to know how to fix a qualification problem. They need to know that this company has one, that it is the thing to fix first, and which of the providers they already fund is the right one to do it.
- Support allocated by who asked loudest, or who is free this month
- The same workshop offered to every company in a cohort
- Advisers making a judgement call with no record of what they decided or why
- No way to tell, later, which support was given to whom
How it works
The diagnosis produces a stage and a root cause. That pair determines a support category: the kind of help indicated. You map your own provision to those categories once, and from then on every company that completes the measure arrives at the right door.
| Root cause | Support category indicated |
|---|---|
| Product | Proposition, value and business case work. Who it is for, what problem it solves, why anyone should pay |
| People | Ownership, capability and leadership. Who is accountable, and whether they can do it |
| Process | Operating rhythm. Qualification, stage discipline, inspection, forecasting |
| Repeatability | Codification and enablement. Capturing what works so it survives the person who did it |
The stage then sets the domain. Closing plus Process indicates deal governance and close planning. Demand plus Product indicates proposition and segment work. Sixteen combinations, sixteen categories of support.
The rules that select the category are part of the licensed layer, not the published method. What is published is that the mapping exists, is deterministic, and does not change between two companies with the same result.
Your provision, not ours
You keep the providers you already have.
This is not a marketplace we bring to you. Most institutions already fund the support: an in-house commercial team, a framework of approved providers, a mentor pool, existing programmes. What is missing is the mechanism that matches a company to the right one at the point of need.
You map your provision to the categories once, in your own directory. Where you have a gap, you can fill it from ours, or leave it empty and see how often it comes up before spending anything.
- Your internal commercial or business support team
- Providers on your existing framework, by category
- Your own programmes and clinics, with eligibility and capacity
- Referral routes you already use, made explicit
Advisers and programmes keep their clients and their fees. Routing aims existing spend, it does not replace it.
Three rules that never bend
- Routing indicates support. It never rations it. A routing outcome is not an eligibility decision, a gate, or a reason to withhold anything from a company. It must not be used to decide who gets access to a programme or to funding.
- A human can always override. The person who knows the company can send them somewhere else, and the override is recorded with a reason. That record is more useful to us than the original routing, because it is where the rules are wrong.
- Payment never influences the category. The diagnosis decides what kind of help is indicated. Only who appears within an indicated category can ever be commercial, and any provider we own or are affiliated with is disclosed as such.
What it produces
Routing is where the reporting stops being a snapshot and starts being evidence.
| Recorded at routing | What it makes possible |
|---|---|
| The category indicated, and the provider chosen | You can say what was offered, to whom, and why |
| Whether it was taken up | Take-up by category, which tells you where provision is missing or unattractive |
| The result at the next measurement | Movement, set against the intervention that preceded it |
| Overrides and their reasons | Where the routing was wrong, which is how it improves |
Without routing, a cohort report says a proportion of companies moved. With it, the report says which support they received first. That is the difference between a measurement exercise and evidence a funder will accept.
We report what preceded what. We do not claim the intervention caused the movement, and no report we produce will say that it did.
Getting started
Routing needs no engineering. A directory is a list, and the first version is usually built in an afternoon from provision you already fund.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | We give you the sixteen support categories |
| 2 | You map your existing provision to them and mark the gaps |
| 3 | Companies completing the measure see the indicated category and the route you chose |
| 4 | Take-up and outcomes come back in the cohort report |