Delivery in a Crisis: Setting Priorities When Everything Is Urgent

In a crisis, you set priorities by capping the number of initiatives running at once and ranking each one by the cost of its delay. Urgency alone is not a criterion, because in a crisis every request looks urgent. What matters is which work causes the greatest damage per week if it slips, and which work can still have an effect in this phase at all.

This article describes an approach from delivery practice: a four-step triage, a calculation for the cost of delay and a checklist for the executive decision meeting. It is written for managing directors and heads of function who must steer a supply crisis, a supplier failure, the loss of a key customer or a wave of cost pressure.

Why does everything become urgent at once in a crisis?

Everything becomes urgent at once because each affected department reports its own urgency and nobody sees the total. Sales needs a solution for the angry key account, production needs a replacement for the failed supplier, controlling needs a new liquidity plan, and the executive team wants a daily update on all of it. Each demand is justified on its own. Together they exceed the capacity of the teams, and the teams respond as people do under pressure: they start everything and finish little.

Queueing theory has described this effect for decades. According to Little's law, proved by John Little in 1961, the average lead time of a piece of work equals the number of items in progress divided by throughput. If throughput stays constant and the number of open initiatives doubles, the time until any single initiative is finished doubles as well. That is exactly what happens when a crisis produces ten new emergency measures alongside the existing projects: the measure meant to rescue operations waits behind nine others.

Switching between tasks adds to this, because every switch costs time to get back in. That hits the teams just when capacity is scarcest. A deeper look at limiting concurrent work is in the article on limiting work in progress.

How does a triage for initiatives work?

A triage for initiatives sorts every running and every new piece of work into exactly one of four classes: immediate, planned, parked or stopped. The term comes from emergency medicine, where it describes sorting by urgency of treatment when resources are scarce. Applied to delivery, it means you deliberately allocate capacity to the initiatives with the highest impact and visibly set the rest aside rather than working on them halfway.

The approach has four steps.

1. Inventory: All running and requested initiatives go onto one list, each with an owner, a goal and the effort spent so far. The inventory usually takes half a day and delivers, for the first time, the sum of all demands on the teams. Many executive teams see here for the first time that the list is a multiple of available capacity.
2. Capacity limit: Management sets how many initiatives each team may run at once. For crisis phases, one initiative per team is a sound starting value, two at most. Everything above that goes into the queue.
3. Rating by cost of delay: Each initiative receives an amount in euros per week that its delay costs, and an estimated duration. The calculation follows below.
4. Decision and communication: The order is set in a meeting with all owners and published in writing. Anyone who wants to move an initiative forward names the one that gives way.

The fourth step is the most effective. Without the rule that every move forward triggers a move back, the immediate list grows again within days. How to decide escalations quickly without blocking the teams is covered in the article on escalations in agile programmes.

How do you calculate the cost of delay?

You calculate the cost of delay as the amount per week that an initiative costs or forgoes for as long as it is not completed. Donald Reinertsen made the concept central to prioritisation in his book “The Principles of Product Development Flow” (2009). The order follows from the ratio of cost of delay to duration: initiatives with high weekly damage and short duration come first.

The following example is illustrative and shows the logic. A machine builder with a shortage of one component has four initiatives on its list.

The ratio column is cost per week divided by duration in weeks. Customer communication ranks ahead of the second supplier, although its weekly cost is lower, because it is finished in one week and limits damage quickly. The planning software makes sense in the long run but causes the least damage per week during the crisis and ties up twelve weeks of capacity. It is parked, with a fixed date for review.

The business function that owns each initiative estimates the amounts, and finance checks the assumptions for plausibility. The orders of magnitude must be right, because the ranking only changes when the ratios shift by a multiple. A detailed guide is in the article on cost of delay.

Which initiatives should be parked during a crisis?

Initiatives should be parked when their benefit does not depend on the crisis and their delay causes no damage in the next eight to twelve weeks. This includes optimisation projects, internal reorganisations unrelated to the crisis and tool rollouts that only pay off once the crisis has ended. These initiatives often have strong sponsors, because they were planned long ago and have already tied up budget.

The decision becomes easier with four questions for each initiative. Will it change a metric that matters in the crisis within the next twelve weeks? Does another immediate initiative depend on it? Would stopping it cause costs beyond the work already spent? Can it be resumed later without loss? If the answer to the first two is no and to the last is yes, the initiative is parked. Effort already invested does not count as an argument, because it is lost regardless of the decision.

A review of the entire initiative portfolio needs its own approach. The article on decluttering the project portfolio shows how to proceed step by step.

What does leadership look like during the crisis?

Leadership during the crisis sets a fixed rhythm for decisions and keeps to it. A weekly meeting with the owners of all immediate initiatives is enough to settle the order. A short daily check of fifteen minutes at most is added, in which blockers become visible. Whatever blocks a team is decided in that check or escalated to a named person who answers within a day.

Transparency matters just as much. In crises the demand for reports rises, and every report costs time from the teams that should be delivering. A single overview showing order, status and blockers, available to everyone concerned, replaces dozens of individual requests. The executive team sees the same picture as the team without anyone preparing a presentation.

In many companies nobody holds the role that keeps this rhythm and defends the order. Professionally it belongs to delivery management: a person who coordinates delivery across departments, makes dependencies visible and enforces the capacity limit. How this role differs from project management and the Scrum Master is described in the article on the delivery manager.

Delivery in a crisis with Niehues Consulting

Niehues Consulting is a consultancy for AI management and organisation design from a delivery perspective, based in Düsseldorf. Founder Marin Niehues builds organisations that deliver, in projects ranging from VC-funded scale-ups to DAX 40 corporations, with assignments in more than 20 countries on six continents. In the service area of delivery management, he takes the role of delivery manager, project manager or product owner and designs the organisation so that decisions are made quickly.

The approach follows the Niehues Delivery Model with its three phases. Three of its checking questions matter for delivery in a crisis: Who decides, who delivers, who uses? What is the baseline, and how do we measure success? Who is responsible for operations from day one? The first question settles who sets the order and who enforces it. The second provides the delay-cost estimate. The third prevents a crisis initiative from being completed with nobody responsible afterwards. The entry point is a free initial consultation of 30 minutes, which you can book via the contact form.