Abstract illustration: faint lanes of small blocks joined by connectors. One block comes into focus, the connectors it touches resolve, and one previously hidden connector appears crossing between lanes.
Decide with defensibility.
DecisionGrade™ puts the dependencies behind a decision in front of the people who own them, and records who confirmed what, and when. Built for regulated enterprises that answer to boards and regulators.
A decision-enablement platform for regulated enterprises, from Viner Advisory Ltd.
What it sounds like, when you hear it
- “We just need to know what happens if we pause this” — and the answer takes weeks or more to arrive.
- Teams discovering dependencies on each other’s roadmaps late, and by accident.
- “Which of these can we switch off, and in what order?” — and nobody will sign the decommission, because nobody can prove what still depends on them.
- A decision has to stand up to a board or a regulator, and the evidence behind it is a slide deck.
The costly failures are rarely the risks you assessed and accepted. They are the dependencies nobody wrote down: on no plan, no register and no architecture diagram, but known to a handful of experts.
Know what a decision touches, before you make it.
Three things, scoped to the decision in front of you
Dependency analysis and visualisation
DecisionGrade analyses the part of your estate the decision actually touches, not the whole organisation, working from whatever observation tooling and repository you already run. The dependencies that matter, including the ones no tool can see, are put to the people who own them while there is still time to act.
Human‑in‑the‑loop oversight
Your experts stay in the loop only where their judgement changes the answer: minutes to confirm what they own, not weeks trawling the estate.
Audit trail capture and management
Every finding carries its evidence, its assumptions and who stood behind it. Leaders can see what has been confirmed and what is still open, and can defend the reasoning whenever the decision is questioned.
Judgement stays with the people accountable for it.
Value in week one, not quarter three
Phase 1
week 1
Agree the decision question and what data genuinely exists. You get a Decision Question Statement and an initial dependency hypothesis, even if data access stalls.
Phase 2
weeks 2–6
Iterative analysis of the available data, ending in the decision pack: the question answered, with any gaps flagged, documented and traceable.
Phase 3
optional
Keep DecisionGrade in place, so the next question starts from what has already been confirmed.
Illustrative scenario
£80m of deferrals, two hidden breaks
A CRO and CIO need £80m of programme deferrals over 18 months to fund a new regulatory programme. The cut list going to the board assumes all eight programmes can be deferred independently. Two of them turn out to carry obligations under PRA operational resilience that no plan had recorded. The people who own those obligations confirm it, and the exposure is on the record before the cut list reaches the board.
Illustrative outcome: £64m of deferrals signed off with confidence, £16m found elsewhere, a regulatory dependency break avoided, and a board-level audit trail behind the call, with a named validator behind each finding.
Why DecisionGrade rather than in-house
The analysis is done for you.
Structuring and analysing the data a decision rests on is specialist work that competes with the day job.
Built for scrutiny.
Expert review is part of the method, so the reasoning is traceable for boards and regulators.
Fits the estate you run.
It sits on top of whatever observation tooling and repository you already have, and gets better as your information flows improve. Nothing new to maintain alongside.
Built for large, regulated estates
DecisionGrade is led by Jeremy Viner: more than 20 years in technology strategy and enterprise architecture across financial services, government services, retail, telecoms, energy, postal services and consumer goods, including over a decade in major financial institutions building and leading an enterprise decision-enablement capability.
About JeremyDoes the pattern fit?
A 25-minute conversation is enough to find out. If it does, Phase 1 stands alone: one week, one clear decision question.
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