The Cost of Delay

WSJF divides cost of delay by duration and treats delay as a constant rate. Most projects follow a curve instead, and the curve can flip your sequence.

Nobody approved doubling the scope. It arrived one reasonable addition at a time, and the ratchet only ever turns one way.

Fast tracking project management compresses one schedule. Expediting a project to the front of a shared queue shortens it too, and the work behind pays.

Rework looks like ordinary progress on every meter a manager watches. The rework spiral prices what redoing the same work is actually costing you.

Putting a project on hold looks free. The value clock keeps running, a project restart costs more than resuming would, and the capacity is rarely freed.

Project selection scores a new project on its own merits. The real cost lands on the work already in flight, and no business case shows it.

Multitasking your scarcest specialist across three important projects looks like good prioritization. It delays all three, and the delay has a price.

Cost of delay prices a whole project's lateness. Drag cost prices the one critical-path activity actually causing it, and names it.