Tag: Urgency

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,…
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…
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…
Why bother *quantifying* the Cost of Delay?

Quantifying the Cost of Delay of the things we are working on helps us with: Improving the ROI delivered with a scarce resource Managing the demands of multiple stakeholders Making sensible economic trade-offs Changing the focus of the conversation: less on cost and dates, more on Value and Urgency. Sounds pretty good, right? Despite what you may think,…
SAFe and Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

In 2012, when Dean Leffingwell launched the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) it was obvious the impact that Don Reinertsen’s teachings had on elements of the design. In particular, SAFe specifies Don’s recommended method for scheduling: Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Whatever you think of the rest of SAFe, it really should be commended for encouraging organisations further along in…
WSJF – Weighted Shortest Job First

What is WSJF? Weighted Shortest Job First is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, prioritisation method) that maximises the amount of whatever it is you choose to “weight” by in a given time period through a constrained resource. Where did WSJF come from? Back in the 1970’s, when computing resources were both extremely expensive and…
Innovation and cannibalization

How should we treat cannibalization when considering value and urgency? I have been asked this a number of times, usually in the context of quantifying the Cost of Delay. The issue at hand is whether you should take into account the likelihood that a new product or feature might “eat” the profits currently enjoyed in some other…
#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…
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…
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…
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…