See Queues

This paper focuses on finding queues and watching queues, with the goal of improving project management practice, and it all starts with identifying queues in your project environment.

“See queues” are words of encouragement for project managers. If you are able to overlay a queue structure onto a project challenge, you automatically gain the benefits of years of research, metrics, and examples upon which to draw ideas for improvement.

Queues

Keeping it Simple

A queue is best known to most of us as a line or, more to the point, waiting in line. Examples are everywhere and often frustratingly so.

Queues, says Leonard Kleinrock, are an example of systems of flow; a commodity, a request, a person, or an idea moves from one point to another through one or more channels. Systems of flow examples are:

1. Automobiles flow from city to city over the roadways. Automobiles are the commodity, cities are the points, and the roadways are the channels.
2. In an IT domain, a request arrives for a new laptop via the web request system, and the laptop is a commodity provided by a fulfillment team. The request is transmitted via the online system, the channel. The fulfillment occurs at the endpoint.
3. In a project, units of work (pieces of the scope) are the commodities, which flow via the schedule (channel) to pair up with …