Tag: Cost of Delay

Cost of Delay and CD3 Prioritisation at Scale
“How to generate the highest Return On Investment toward strategic priorities — across multiple teams that need to work together.” I get asked this question a lot. I’ve also seen lots of slow, disjointed, unresponsive and generally painful ways to approach this — and in lots of different organisations. Rather than poking holes in alternatives,…
Why Duration and not Cost?
We get this question a lot. It is referring to the denominator of CD3 (Cost of Delay Divided by Duration). For various reasons, people struggle with this. There’s perhaps an element of bikeshedding involved too, with people generally more comfortable talking about what they know and understand, and avoiding the Cost of Delay part, which…
Product Roadmaps and Cost of Delay
I sometimes get asked about how Cost of Delay and CD3 work with Product Roadmaps. This post is an initial attempt to collate my current thinking on this (as green as that may be). Firstly, it really depends what you mean by “Roadmap”. I’ve seen lots of Roadmaps, mostly bad, and a few good ones.…
CD3 and Cost of Delay puzzles
Johanna Rothman sent us through some common puzzles about Cost of Delay and CD3. Posting our thoughts here, in case others have similar questions or suggestions… “Who estimates the Value part of Cost of Delay?” In most organisations it tends to be the Product Owners or Product Managers who facilitate estimating the Cost of Delay. We see them more…
CD3 and proportionality to Outcomes
Here’s an interesting question: “I have been busy trying to figure out Cost of Delay but I’m stuck on a certain question — hopefully you can enlighten me. An example: Let’s say I have an ice cream stand that is currently at capacity, selling 10 ice-creams per week. I have two options to boost capacity: Option…
How to Find Gun Owners Fast
This is a wonderful piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas, writing for GQ magazine. It’s about a strange little federal agency in the US that runs traces on guns that are associated with a crime, trying to figure out who bought it. It’s long, but well worth reading in it’s entirety. There’s a few parts worth highlighting and looking into a…
Comparing Cost of Delay approaches
There are many different ways to approach Cost of Delay. It ranges from very simple categorisation or qualitative assessments, to more rigorous quantification of Cost of Delay. None of these is inherently “wrong”. (Rarely are things as black and white as that.) That does not mean they are equal, however. Some approaches to Cost of Delay are a lot more…
Fund the teams, not the project
One of the first articles I published highlights the problems created by doing funding and approval in large batches. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in most organisations and a lot of the malaise we see in I.T. is difficult to improve because of this. Addressing this requires a viable alternative though. It’s not enough to just point…
SAFe & Cost of Delay: a suggested improvement
I have previously shared my view on the way SAFe teaches Cost of Delay. It’s possible that the feedback came in too large a batch, so maybe I can break it down and suggest some incremental improvements. I’ll start with the part I struggle with the most and see if we can make it just a little bit better… The SAFe “Cost of Delay”…
Managing Queues in Product Development
“Blindness to queues” is one of the cardinal sins of product development. Why? Well, here is a typical value stream map for a feature being delivered by a software team. Notice all the waiting? Not laziness: lots of Work-In-Process; Demand > Supply The reason for all the waiting is not that anyone is sitting around staring out the window…
Qualitative Cost of Delay
If you want to make better Product Development decisions, it really helps if you quantify the Cost of Delay. But what if you’re allergic to numbers? Perhaps a qualitative assessment of Cost of Delay would help get you started? Having helped lots of organisations quantify Cost of Delay across their portfolios, we know very well that it isn’t easy…
Challenges with Cost of Delay and CD3: Duration
A couple of week’s ago I received an email asking how for help with applying Cost of Delay and CD3 to some potentially difficult cases. I enjoy these challenges. For an idea to survive, it needs to be stressed to see how it responds. Maybe the idea is completely flawed (e.g. the Geocentric model of the universe). Maybe it…
#Agile2014
We’re coming to Orlando! Serious teams, developers, managers and executives from over 40 countries are about to descend on an unsuspecting Orlando, Florida. There’ll be over 1,800 attendees exploring more than 240 talks and workshops from some world-class experts. We have been invited to run a workshop (details below) on Monday, July 28 (14:00 – 15:15). According to…
#MIXIT14 – Prioritising ideas using Cost of Delay
Özlem Yüce is coming to Lyon, France to speak at MIXIT14! How can we survive in a world where stakeholders want it all – and they want it yesterday? Are you tired of conflicting priorities and mechanisms that do not give your clear focus? Then this session is for you! At the end of Özlem’s…
#LKNA14
We’re coming to San Francisco! Looking forward to hearing some fantastic speakers talk about “Modern Management Methods” and share a few stories and thoughts of our own, at the Lean Kanban North America 2014 conference. We’ve got a couple of slots: The first will be a talk on Tuesday May 6, 2014 3:30pm – 4:10pm about…
MoneyDev: quantifying value vs gut-feel
Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team was in trouble. After a successful 2001 season he was losing three of his best players but he had no money to replace them. As Plato said: “Necessity is the mother of invention”. With his back to the wall, rather than rely on the instinct…
Value, Urgency and Organisational “Maturity”
When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. This hypothesis, that the organisation isn’t ready, is a common response to a lot of ideas…
Lessons on patience: the benefit of delay
In an earlier post, I discussed the importance of speed and the cost of delay for organisations that aren’t leading the market. For those who are attempting to lead the market (as opposed to a fast follower strategy, like Samsung) the Cost of Delay is still there, and speed is still a vital ingredient, but…
The future is cheap — the value of time
Chris Matts recently wrote about the impact of discounting on investments in software development. He showed a comparison between a few different investment options for a software project in order to demonstrate the negligible effect of discounting. Whilst I agree with the conclusion – that discounting is mostly pointless for software — I wanted to add a…
Catching waves: speed and patience
One of the most incredible things I have experienced as a human being is the feeling of riding a moving wall of water. I am most happy when I’m paddling around in a rubber suit putting myself in the path of rolling mountains of H2O and trying to catch them. Living in London means I don’t…
Relativity and Rounding Errors
Putting a price tag on time can sound scary. A common fear is that the estimate of value will be misused as a tool for planning – much like other estimates of time or cost often are. When estimates are later proven to lack the precision they never had, those who underestimate the complexity of…
The problem with projects
If you consider the economic value and urgency for each of the requirements for your software development project, you will likely find that it is not evenly distributed. It’s not four levels of value (like MoSCoW might suggest). It’s also not linear (like your relatively prioritised backlog might suggest). It probably looks something like this……
Black Swan Farming using Cost of Delay
Discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value Improving prioritization has become a tired concept in most IT departments, and yet it has the potential to change the conversation from one of cutting cost, to delivering valuable solutions as quick as the business needs it. This paper examines how Maersk Line applied an economic…
Urgency, duration and CD3 prioritisation
Interesting question from the resident DJ Rough: Urgent Optimism and how it can drive behaviour: gamification.co/2013/02/14/how… So, is Cost Of Delay entering into gamification? /cc @joshuajames — Dan Rough (@danrough) April 3, 2013 The article he’s pointing to talks about how we are motivated by the opportunity to finish small or urgent tasks. Here’s a snip…
Value: a framework for thinking
How might we think about the potential value of the products and services we could develop? Is there some way of structuring our thoughts so as to more quickly surface the potential value? I want to explain a bit about the background and development of a framework that attempts to do just that. This framework…
Lessons on speed: Samsung and Apple
The Cost of Delay for organisations that are not market leaders is very high. Whilst companies employing a “Fast Follower” strategy don’t have to invest as much time to discover what the market wants, they do need to be very fast at developing similar products in order to quickly catch up to and slipstream behind…
How to make billions of dollars from spare bits
< div>Happy 20th Birthday, SMS. Wow, haven’t you grown?! Sure, you’re still only 160 characters long, but none of us would have guessed 20 years ago how much a part of our lives you would become – the most widely used data application in the world with 3.6 billion active users. By utilising a bit of