A School of Continuous Improvement replication finds its own five-level commerce scoring model can no longer tell operators apart, and reports that the model's use in terminal-allocation gating continues regardless.
The five-level model that once separated strip-mall traders now returns Optimised for nine in ten loyalty-kiosk and food-truck operators, and terminal allocation still follows the score
A scoring rubric built five years ago to separate five levels of commerce-continuity practice can no longer separate any of them, and the School of Continuous Improvement is publishing the result rather than quietly retiring the rubric.
The Commerce Continuity Maturity Model was validated against seventy-one strip-mall food-court traders in 2025, cleanly enough to set their lease and payment-terminal priority. Moved this year onto a supermarket loyalty-kiosk row and a food-truck strip, unmodified, the same five-level rubric returned its top tier, Optimised, for fifty-eight of sixty-four operators regardless of what raters actually observed on the floor. Agreement between raters on relative ranking, strong in the original validation, fell close to chance.
The Continuity Office reads the flattened score as the instrument running out of variation to find at these sites, not as a reason to pause the terminal-allocation rule it still gates. The review-eligible band has been widened instead, to admit sites the rubric can no longer tell apart.
A five-level scale that gives every site the same top mark isn’t obviously broken. It’s telling us something about the floor we’re standing on that the food court never had reason to say.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
A third-site re-audit, with an independently blinded rater panel and the rubric’s original scoring guide held unmodified, is planned for the next reporting cycle. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9dxurq.