What is your cost of delay?
When prioritising next actions there are many different techniques, one of which is Weighted Shortest Job First or WSJF.
This framework prioritises work as follows:
Cost of delay / time to implement
Cost of delay
This is the business impact of not doing the work or delaying the work. For difference businesses this is calculated in different ways, examples include:
- Customer churn
- Competitor threat
- Increased technical debt
- Downstream dependencies
- Lost sales
For your business you need to create a formula that captures the cost of delaying each piece of work to help decide when is best to start it.
Time to implement
This is the total time to complete the task. This can be in any units of measure (days, points etc) as long as it is consistent for all tasks.
Pros and cons
This formula maximises the value created in the shortest time, it forces you to think about which tasks generate value quickly - and therefore have a high cost of delay.
The cons are this formula can get complex quickly, it is harder to model long term value over short term gains and does not take into account what resources are available vs what are required.