Hidden costs of expediting

Tom Breur

16 June 2013

In Agile we try to “maximize the work not done.” I guess one could say that “minimizing waste” is the Lean equivalent. Poor planning all too often results in expediting, and expediting is one of those nasty sources of waste.

When a delivery date is fixed, you need to honor that. If that means expediting, you are facing additional costs, and avoidable waste. Sometimes arbitrary planning deadlines lead to expediting, which is a double shame. Managers can set an early deadline, to either build in leeway, or apply extraneous “motivation” to their staff. Both seem due to lack of trust. Regardless, expediting adds cost.

So what are some of the costs of expediting work? When people have to work overtime, you usually need to pay them more, and also risk burning them out, and what’s worse: people who work too hard, too long hours, tend to make more mistakes. This makes your delivery schedule unpredictable.

Sometimes quality control and/or testing are omitted. This may work, if the product was fault free. That could be a reasonable guess, albeit at the expense of the customer, who may now be the first to find bugs…

Additionally, there are some largely hidden costs of expediting. As mentioned before: when people work overtime, they make more mistakes. And here’s the kicker: it slows you down, because it sets a balancing loop in motion. You expedite by working longer hours, make more mistakes that you need to catch in time (!), and that means they have to work even more overtime to fix the newly introduced bugs!

Expediting always costs, and often more than you think. That can hardly be lean, can it?