Lean teams will defer commitment on high risk decisions. Generally this means that instead of putting a lot of time and effort into making sure they make early, risky decisions correctly, they avoid the high cost of incorrect decisions by finding ways to defer making the commitment.

An Example from Development

Applications teams can benefit from delaying some large architectural decisions. For instance, by taking a standards based approach, they might delay the need to select the message broker used by their communication systems. Instead they might develop with the messaging layer abstracted so that several brokers would be compatible with the system and could be benchmarked as the system matured and its needs became more clear. This way the development team doesn’t end up making a bad, expensive decision early in the process when they know the least about their needs. Instead, they keep their options open at the cost of adding an abstraction layer. Continue reading →