An Observation on Queuing Tasks From a Lunch Counter

So, earlier today I’m at my local Honda dealership waiting for my car to get its tires and oil changed – a process that takes far too long in my estimation.  While I wait, there’s a lunch counter where one petite woman is responsible for serving up hot and cold lunch items for not only waiting customers, but the dealership staff as well.

I ordered a sandwich when it was fairly quiet and got it in short-order.  Things began to fall apart as more requests built up in her “queue”.  First, several staff come up to the bar and begin ordering the daily special which she scrambles to prepare.  Then, someone from the message desk came up and gave her a pink slip indicating she needed to return a phone call.  In between, one customer ordered a fried egg sandwich.

She got delayed for the phone call.

Then, another customer appeared asking for the daily special.  She got served first, while the prior customer waited.

And so it went on.  What became apparent was that this short-order cook had no ticketing system – literally.  She dealt with requests in an adhoc fashion, and was not fully able to tell when she was done until staff or customers looked like they had their food.

What I was observing was a real-world example of how I see software development shops go off the rails when they have no disciplined process like Scrum or XP in place: 

• The input queue is continually harangued because there’s no way of telling what’s high-priority;
• Tasks that are in-flight may be subordinated to ad-hoc queries made by management or other superiors (“I need you to make this one change – it’ll only take 15 minutes and you’re the only one who can do it…”)
• Because there’s no discipline on how tasks are “loaded” into the system to be worked on, it’s impossible to really tell how much effort is left;  worse still, adhoc requests aren’t prioritized and result in slippages.

A lot of shops run like this because it seems to be easier than dealing with the discipline, thinking it slows them down.  Which is really too bad, because I have to think that they’ve all been through countless situations where this hasn’t been the case.  In the example of my lunch counter friend, she would benefit significantly from enforcing a ticket system – even if it was a “Now serving No. 0020”.  At least then, expectations could be reasonably set with her Product Owners of when they would be served.

Food for thought.