Communications of the ACM
A Little Queue Theory
Credit: Alicia Kubista / Andrij Borys Associates
So, how full is your in-box? How many tasks on your to-do list? Take a look at that calendar—any open spaces? No? That's good, isn't it? The more work that is in the hopper, the more must be getting done, right? Empty spaces in the plan means less is being achieved, right? Well, maybe not.
It seems to be an axiom of modern projects that for every project team member, every minute of every day should be filled with assigned tasks. I know project managers who boast of loading themselves and their subordinates with way more than 100% of available time. It is not uncommon for people to be juggling 10 or 20 tasks concurrently. As one who admits to poor multitasking capability, I have always thought there is a downside to having too much on one's plate at one time. But it is difficult to argue against this overloading of effort when the equation is more work on the task list means more gets done. But is that true?
Comments
Rudolf Olah
There's another side to this; politics. If everyone isn't seen as doing as much work as possible, they could get in trouble (or at least their manager might). So the queue and workload are *visible* while the thoroughput isn't as visible. If no one is held accountable for how long the uncompleted tasks/backlog is becoming, then it will continue to be ignored though most bug/issue trackers will give you this valuable statistic.
Phillip Armour
Rudolph,
You are right. Many of the overloading problems result from the need to be seen to be busy which often has a political source. But even if tasks arent issues queuing theory shows that when people are loaded close to, or over, capacity bad things are likely to happen downstream. Most projects track delays in task start or task completion and sometimes replan when the variance gets large. But I have never personally seen a project explicitly measure the size of its work queues to use as a leading indicator of project delays.
Phil
Displaying all 2 comments