Five forms of cost

Looking at five forms of cost helps you describe the consequence of a friction before you decide whether it's worth pursuing.

Money. Look for revenue you aren't capturing, margin given away, avoidable labor, rework, leakage, or excess inventory.

Time. Notice waiting, searching, transferring, reconciling, rewriting, chasing approval, and rebuilding knowledge that already exists somewhere.

Customer experience. Slow responses, inconsistent answers, preventable errors, weak personalization, and handoffs customers have to manage can all make it harder to do business with you.

Speed. Some decisions and actions lose value while they wait. Find where the delay changes the result.

Risk. Examine uncontrolled data, undocumented judgment, unreviewed output, fragile dependencies, compliance exposure, and decisions nobody can explain.

One issue may touch several of these. Describe the connections, but take care with the arithmetic: counting the same consequence twice makes a proposal look stronger without improving it.