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DICE change risk calculator

Assess the risk of a change programme before you start it, using the DICE model from Harvard Business Review.

5 factors to grade

Grade the five factors

Lower is better throughout. Team performance integrity and senior management commitment count double, which is what makes them the two worth fixing first.

  1. Duration

    The total length of a short project, or the time between two milestones on a longer one. Long gaps without a checkpoint are where projects drift.

    Duration

  2. Team performance integritycounts double

    The team's ability to execute, with particular weight on the project leader. Counts double in the score.

    Team performance integrity

  3. Senior management commitmentcounts double

    Visible backing from the sponsor and senior executives. Counts double in the score.

    Senior management commitment

  4. Local commitment

    Support from the people the change actually lands on.

    Local commitment

  5. Additional effort

    How much extra the change asks of people, over and above business as usual.

    Additional effort

Your DICE score

Only used as the heading on your result and in the download's filename. Like your grades it stays in this browser: we never receive it, and it is not used for marketing.

Grade all five factors and your score appears here. It runs from 7 at best to 28 at worst.

How to use the calculator

DICE puts a change programme into one of three zones from five straightforward judgements. It is quick, it is well evidenced, and it tells you which two things to fix first. Grade each factor below, and remember that lower is better throughout.

The five factors are:

  • Duration: the time between reviews, rather than the length of the whole programme. Frequent, meaningful reviews beat a short programme nobody checks
  • Integrity: the capability of the delivery team, and whether it can actually do what is being asked of it
  • Senior commitment: whether leadership visibly and repeatedly backs the change, rather than announcing it once
  • Local commitment: whether the people who have to live with the change are behind it
  • Effort: the additional work the change puts on people, over and above their existing jobs

The factors are not weighted equally. Integrity and senior commitment carry the most weight, which is the model's central and most useful claim: a capable team with visible backing survives a lot, and neither enthusiasm nor a tidy plan compensates for their absence.

Reading your score

The result places the programme in a win, worry, or woe zone. The zone matters less than the two worst factors, because those are what you can act on. A worry score driven by effort needs a different response from the same score driven by weak local commitment.

Run it again once you have changed something. The calculator is most useful as a before-and-after measure, not a one-off verdict.

Understanding the model

For the background to the model, how the score is weighted, and what the underlying research found, read our full guide to the DICE change management model.

If you are building change capability rather than assessing a single programme, see our change management challenge.

Talk to us about reducing change risk across your programmes

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