The Hidden Millions: What are blocking dependencies really costing your organization?

Blocking dependencies could be creating lengthy wait times between your teams, imposing significant drains on your organization’s resources.

Most leaders recognize that improving flow matters, but few have quantified the actual financial impact of teams waiting on other teams to release work. At Conflux, we help leaders to quantify and eliminate these costly organizational barriers, enabling teams to deliver value quickly.

Blocked time is blocked money

When engineers spend just one hour per day blocked by dependencies or waiting on other teams, the costs can accumulate rapidly. In a medium-sized organization with 400 engineers, a single hour of daily wait time results in annual costs of around $8 million. If you work with known delays between teams, you can calculate a rough cost to your organization using this straightforward formula:

Annual wait time cost = Number of technical staff × Average hourly cost × Hours spent waiting daily × Working days per year

For example: 400 engineers × $75/hour × 1 hour daily × 260 working days = $7,800,000 annually

This is likely a conservative estimate for large organizations with many teams-of-teams. Many organizations experience 2-3 hours of wait time daily, potentially wasting around $16-24 million annually.

Root causes of blocking dependencies

Wait times are not isolated; they're symptoms of deeper organizational issues. From assessing hundreds of organizations over many years, Conflux has identified the primary causes that create costly bottlenecks:

Misaligned team boundaries

When team boundaries don't match business domains or value streams, unnecessary dependencies multiply across the organization. Teams structured around technical specialties force handoffs for even simple features, often leading to friction at transition points.

Common boundary issues include:

• Arbitrary organizational divisions creating artificial barriers to flow

• Unclear responsibility boundaries leading to decision paralysis

• Fragmented ownership requiring excessive coordination

Excessive cognitive load

Teams overwhelmed by complexity inevitably become bottlenecks for others. Unrealistic responsibilities create knowledge gaps and slow response times as team members struggle to maintain expertise across too many domains.

Cognitive load problems usually manifest as:

• Excessive context-switching between multiple domains

• Unclear prioritization systems forcing teams to choose between conflicting demands

• Reduced capacity precisely where other teams need responsive collaboration

Inadequate platform capabilities

Self-service capabilities form the backbone of efficient organizational flow. When platforms fail to enable true self-service, every team action requires support from others, creating unnecessary dependencies on platform teams.

Key platform shortcomings include:

• Unstable or poorly documented internal tools generating constant support needs

• Overly restrictive access controls establishing unnecessary approval chains

• Infrastructure teams overwhelmed with support requests becoming organizational bottlenecks

Conflicting incentive structures

Organizational flow depends on aligned metrics and goals. When different teams operate under conflicting incentive structures, artificial barriers emerge that slow down the entire organization.

Misaligned incentives create situations where:

• Operations teams measured on stability but not speed become delivery bottlenecks

• Development teams measured on velocity but not quality create downstream dependencies

• Security teams measured on risk elimination rather than enablement create approval bottlenecks

Highly coupled functions

When processes, teams, or systems become tightly intertwined, they create structural blockages that resist optimization. Highly coupled services force synchronized timing and create artificial bottlenecks that prevent independent flow.

Highly coupled processes in service delivery manifest as:

• Synchronized release schedules requiring multiple teams to coordinate timing

• Shared deployment pipelines where one team's issues block everyone

• Sequential approval chains forcing teams to wait regardless of change size

Knowledge silos and communication barriers

When information doesn't flow, dependencies multiply exponentially. Specialized knowledge locked within individual teams creates single points of failure and forces others to wait for answers. Inconsistent communication patterns lead to waiting and misalignment as teams struggle to coordinate effectively.

The result is an organization where information blockages create constant waiting and reduced delivery.

The wider impact: increased work and reduced throughput

In addition to causing wait times, blocking dependencies often trigger another costly behavior; engineers and developers tend to start new tasks when blocked, increasing Work In Progress (WIP). 

This increased WIP leads to higher cognitive load across teams, reducing focus and quality. Even if people aren't literally waiting around for 1-2 hours per day, starting new tasks or projects due to blocked workflows typically results in lower total organizational throughput.

Results in action: the EBSCO transformation

Our work with EBSCO, a leading data research company, demonstrated the ROI of addressing blocking dependencies. By applying Team Topologies principles, EBSCO established new team boundaries aligned to value streams and implemented a more curated approach to supporting platforms. EBSCO achieved an ROI of $9 million annually and saw a 25% increase in feature delivery speed. 

In addition to purely financial benefits, EBSCO’s new, more efficient team structure is also better able to reconfigure for new business capabilities, making it more resilient for the future market. Read more about EBSCO’s transformation — A data-driven approach to fast flow using Team Topologies principles at EBSCO.

Three key strategies for reducing blockers

Organizations that successfully address blocking dependencies and reduce wait times focus on these essential strategies:

Value stream alignment

Restructuring teams around value streams minimizes handoffs and dependencies. When you create cross-functional teams that own value-streams end-to-end and align team boundaries with business domains, not technical specialties, you empower teams with decision-making authority within their domain.

Clear team interaction patterns

Establish explicit agreements for how teams work together. Documenting and streamlining approval processes, creating clear service-level agreements between interdependent teams, and replacing synchronous dependencies with asynchronous interactions removes unnecessary friction.

Enabling platform capabilities

Building platforms that enable teams to self-serve reduces bottlenecks. Design internal platforms based on actual team needs, not theoretical use cases. Focus on enabling team autonomy rather than controlling team behavior, and continuously evolve platform offerings based on usage patterns.

Adapting together removes blocking dependencies

Reducing wait times isn't just about improving developer experience; it's about eliminating the dependencies that directly impact your organization's bottom line. Through Team Topologies principles and our Adapt Together™ approach, Conflux can guide you in creating the conditions for fast flow and organizational success.

Our global team of experts helps organizations identify and eliminate the blocking dependencies that prevent them from delivering at speed.

Book a discovery call today to explore your organization's blocking dependencies.