If you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay” – Don Reinertsen
Cost of delay is the overall cost of loss in revenue, lost opportunity, increased risks, customer respect, etc., due to a delay in realization of value.
This jewel of advice not only tunes us in to what’s important, but it can guide us in all aspects of value creation and delivery. It’s what’s behind CICD, small stories, avoiding handoffs, not working on too many things, automated testing, test-first and more. Pause for a moment and consider how each of these remove delays in workflow, feedback, communication and error detection.
Projects miss schedules not because of one big delay, but due to a succession of small delays – each having a cumulative and cascading sequence of events that compound each other.
Using a mantra of eliminating these delays provides insights for how product owners, ScrumMasters and the team itself can work. Anticipating delays can even enable avoiding impediments instead of having to wait to hit them. The causes of delays are primarily working on items of lesser importance, lacking a focus on finishing, having too much work in process, lack of cross-functional teams, large stories and lack of collaboration. Understanding this greatly speeds up the adoption of Scrum for new teams.