Best for: PMs carrying a project that's slipping — where the timeline has gone soft, the same blockers keep resurfacing, and you're spending more time explaining the delay than closing it.
Every week a project sits behind schedule, the cost compounds quietly — the team stays allocated, stakeholders lose confidence, and the next initiative slides back to make room. "We're a little behind" is rarely a little expensive.
The hardest part isn't the work that's left. It's that you're too embedded in the project to see the one structural fix that would unblock it — and too busy firefighting to build it.
NSI is the annualized, defensible cost of the delay — the number you'd put in front of a sponsor. Here's the arithmetic on a typical stalled mid-size project.
Allocated but not progressing
A 5-person team partly blocked for 6 weeks, losing ~10 effective hrs each per week × $65/hr = ~$19,500 in burn that produced no forward motion.
The benefit you postponed
If the project unlocks $120K/year in revenue or savings, every month late costs ~$10K in benefit that simply never arrives. Three months late = $30K gone, permanently.
The PM tax of managing a slip
Status updates, escalations, and re-planning eat 6 hrs/week of your time. Over a 6-week slip at $85/hr that's ~$3,000 — spent reporting the problem, not solving it.
A single stalled project routinely carries $40K–$60K in NSI before anyone calls it "at risk." A recovery engagement costs a fraction of one month of that.
You can rebuild a budget. You cannot rebuild a quarter. Every week this project stays stuck is a week it will finish later — and that finish date drags every downstream initiative with it. The delay isn't recovered later; it's inherited by everything that comes next.
Bringing in outside execution to break the blocker now isn't extra spend — it's buying back weeks you'd otherwise lose for good.
Send us the stalled project and the deadline you need to hit. We'll scope a recovery that buys the timeline back.