Cost of Delay in Facility Operations: How to Prioritize
A Cost-of-Delay Approach to Facility Operations
Writing for IFMA’s Facility Management Journal, Getty Team’s Delbert Kim explores how Cost of Delay helps facility teams prioritize competing work, make trade-offs explicit, and strengthen frontline decision-making.
The cost of waiting compounds. Each hour a facility issue goes unresolved, the consequence of delay grows, eroding availability, raising risk and narrowing the window to act.
At a Glance
Sequence work by the cost of waiting, not by priority label. Weighing the consequence of delay against the effort required gives teams a defensible order of work, and that order has to be reassessed as deadlines and conditions shift.
Structure matters more than precisiony. A relative 1-5 score across four dimensions (operational impact, time criticality, risk and compliance exposure, stakeholder impact) replaces intuition with a transparent rationale, while life-safety and mandatory regulatory work stays outside the framework.
The larger payoff is distributed judgment at the front line. Communicating intent rather than task lists lets staff adapt as conditions change, and work that is repeatedly deferred points to a structural gap in the operating model (staffing, asset strategy or scheduling) that leadership should address.
A deadline advances. An asset deteriorates. A critical space remains unavailable. Each unfinished task carries a consequence—and those consequences change with time.
When competing demands exceed available capacity, priority labels alone provide limited direction. Facility teams need a shared basis for deciding what should happen first and recognizing when the sequence needs to change.
In “When Everything Is Urgent,” written for IFMA’s Facility Management Journal, Getty Team’s Delbert Kim explores how Cost of Delay brings those decisions into sharper focus. The article examines the consequences of waiting, the effort required to deliver an outcome, and the role of changing operating conditions.
It also addresses a broader leadership opportunity: sharing the framework and its underlying reasoning so frontline teams can assess trade-offs, recognize escalation triggers, and exercise informed operational judgment.
Build prioritization around the realities of your operation.
Getty Team helps organizations translate operating priorities into consistent, reliable facility services.