Control Standard Tools Platform — Turn Project Drift Into Visible Control
Your status reports say green. Your gut says drift. Control Standard is our own product: a behavioural control layer that sits above the project tools you already use, scores real work against the ten disciplines of the standard, and gives every project a named owner, a dated next step, a decision date and a fallback. It is also a learning platform. Interactive courses and chapter assessments teach the standard to a whole team, rather than assuming everyone already shares it.
Four signs work is drifting while everyone looks busy
Drift is not a tooling problem, which is why another board or another dashboard rarely fixes it. It is a set of small behaviours that quietly stop happening, usually with a green status attached.
Green right up to the surprise
Every report says on track until the week it does not. A traffic light is a summary of someone's confidence, not a test of whether the work is genuinely owned, dated and backstopped.
“We're on it” is the whole update
Nobody is lying. The update simply contains nothing a reader can act on: no name, no date, no decision point and no fallback if the plan misses. That gap is where the slippage lives.
The chasing routes through you
You are the only person who can see what is slipping, so you become the mechanism that keeps it moving. That is a visibility problem long before it is a performance problem.
The same problem keeps returning
It arrives wearing a different name each quarter, gets firefighted, and comes back. Nothing decides whether the recurring pain is behavioural, procedural, or genuinely worth building software for.
A control layer above your project tools, not another project tool
Control Standard does not replace Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday or Notion, and it does not ask you to migrate anything. Your plans, tickets and boards stay exactly where they are. The product sits a layer above them and answers the one question those tools were never built to answer: is this work actually under control, or are we simply busy around it?
Every method — agile, waterfall, or the hybrid most teams really run — assumes the same four behaviours underneath. When they quietly stop happening, the method keeps running and the status stays green. Control Standard makes those four visible on every piece of important work:
- A named owner — one person carrying the outcome, not a team name or a distribution list
- A dated next step — the specific thing happening next, with a day against it
- A decision or escalation date — the point at which someone acts rather than waits
- A fallback — what happens if the plan misses, agreed before it misses
Instead of a number out of ten, a scored project comes back with a named status in plain English — wording such as “Strong, room to sharpen” or “multiple areas drifting” — because a phrase travels through a management conversation in a way a score never does. The approach is the same operating discipline we run on client delivery ourselves; you can see how that works on our delivery process page and in the work we have shipped.
Diagnose the drift, then watch it fall week by week
The operational half of the product is a loop rather than a dashboard. You diagnose where work is drifting, apply the standard to a real project, re-score on a cadence, and decide which recurring pain is worth systemising.
It starts with the Drift Report, a five-minute scored self-assessment that is free, unlimited and needs no account or card. From there a project becomes a Control Index: the ten disciplines scored against a real piece of work, with control points recording what must be true, by when, who decides and what the fallback is. Check-ins turn a one-off score into a trend a manager can coach against, and in a team workspace that drift rolls up across projects, people and sub-teams — alongside a delegation map of who owns what.
- Drift Report — a free five-minute diagnostic that returns a named status, not a score out of ten
- Project Control Index — the ten disciplines scored against a real project, discipline by discipline
- Control points — owner, target date, next step, decision-by date and fallback on every critical item
- Check-ins and trend — re-score on a cadence and see which discipline moved, and why
- Team workspace — drift rolled up per team and across the business, with a manager view and 1:1 briefs
- “Should you automate this?” — a second free diagnostic that scores one recurring pain, and will tell you when software is not the answer
A course and an assessment for every chapter of the standard
The second half of Control Standard is a genuine learning platform, and it is the part that makes a rollout stick. Telling a team to “take ownership” changes very little; showing them the concrete moves, then testing that they can use them, changes quite a lot.
There is a short interactive course for each of the ten chapters, built on retrieval practice, scenario decisions and worked examples rather than passive video, and each one ends by handing you straight back to real work. Every chapter also carries an assessment, and passing them earns a verifiable certificate with a public verification page. For a manager, that turns “they have read it” into “they can use it”, and gives every new joiner the same standard in the same way.
The courses are written to stand on their own — nobody has to have read the book first — and the same assessment thinking sits behind our own free business assessments on this site.
- Ten interactive courses, one per chapter, in roughly ten to twenty minute modules
- Retrieval questions, scenario decisions and worked examples instead of video you watch past
- A chapter assessment for each course, with a verifiable certificate and a public verification page
- A team course and assessment dashboard, so a manager can see who has picked up which chapter
- Orientation and Chapter 1 are free, and completed courses stay yours
What is free, and what the paid tiers add
The diagnostics are the part we have committed to keeping free. The Drift Report and the “Should you automate this?” score are unlimited, need no card, and the Pocket Standard — a printable one-page reference of the ten disciplines — is a free download alongside them. A free account adds a limited run of Control Index snapshots.
Beyond that there are individual and team tiers. The individual tier opens the remaining courses, all ten chapter assessments and the certificate, and lifts project tracking, check-in history and printable reports. The team tiers add a shared workspace, per-seat certification, sub-team rollup, the manager view and the delegation map, with larger tiers for a department — a programme view, a read-only API, custom roles and single sign-on.
Published prices and the current state of each tier live on the product's own pricing page, which is the figure to trust; the plans were still being finalised when this page was written, so we would rather point you there than quote a number that moves. If the drift you are looking at turns out to be software-shaped rather than behavioural, that is a different conversation — see our managed AI and automation improvement programme or just ask us for a quote.
The companion platform to the book
Control Standard is the companion platform to The Control Standard by Andrew Lee Ward, Scorchsoft's founder. The book sets out ten chapters — from the drift tax, through what “under control” actually means, to turning repeated problems into system improvement — and the platform is where you run them on real work.
The order does not matter much. Plenty of people meet the standard through the free Drift Report and never open the book; the courses are deliberately written so that reading it is a bonus rather than a prerequisite. The platform also carries the book companion material: the Pocket Standard PDF, an image library of every figure with a short lesson attached, and a library of guides and a glossary covering terms such as the drift tax and control points.
You can read more about the book, and the rest of what we publish, on our books page.
- Ten chapters, each answering a question you can put against any real piece of work
- Pocket Standard — the whole language of control on one printable sheet
- An image library of every figure from the book, with a lesson against each
- Guides and a glossary covering drift tax, control points and named statuses
Start with the free Drift Report
Five minutes, no account and no card, scored against the ten disciplines and returned as a named status you can put in front of someone. If what it surfaces looks less like a behavioural problem and more like a system that needs building, talk to us instead — that is the part of the business this product came out of.
Control Standard FAQs
Straight answers about what the product does, what it does not do, and how teams use it.
No, and deliberately not. It is a behavioural control layer that sits above the project tools you already use, such as Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday or Notion. It holds no tickets and no Kanban board, and nothing needs migrating into it. It answers the question those tools do not: whether a piece of work is genuinely owned, dated, decided and backstopped.
The Drift Report is a free, five-minute scored self-assessment of where your work is quietly slipping. It scores against the ten disciplines of the standard and returns a named status in plain English rather than a number out of ten. It needs no account and no card, and you can run it as many times as you like.
Operational drift is work sliding sideways while everyone stays busy and the status reports stay green. It shows up as rework, chasing, last-minute rescues and missed windows, and it rarely appears as a line on the P&L — which is exactly why it tends to go unmanaged.
No. The interactive courses teach the standard from the ground up and are built to stand on their own. Reading The Control Standard deepens it, and the platform carries the book's companion material, but nothing in the product assumes you have opened it.
No. It does not track activity, time or messages. People score their own work against the standard, and drift is named at the work rather than at the person — this item is drifting, not this individual is failing. It is built as a coaching layer, not a surveillance tool.
There is a short interactive course for each of the ten chapters, built on retrieval practice, scenario decisions and worked examples rather than video. Each course ends with a chapter assessment, and passing all ten earns a verifiable certificate with a public verification page. Managers can see chapter-by-chapter progress across a team.
Set up a workspace and invite people by email. They take a short course per chapter, certify through the chapter assessments, and score their own projects against the ten disciplines. Drift then rolls up into one team view, per team and across the business, so managers coach against a shared standard instead of chasing individually.
Yes on both counts. Control Standard is our own product, built on the delivery discipline we already ran on client projects. Building bespoke platforms of this shape is what we do for clients too — see our capabilities or ask for a quote.
Building for teams across healthcare, logistics, motorsport and manufacturing
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Tell us where you're headed and we'll come back with our thoughts, a realistic plan and a rough cost estimate. Scorchsoft is a UK-based team of app, portal and AI developers, working in-house from Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.