Many organizations are blind to the queue problem in knowledge work
. Dominica Degrandis: Making Work Visible (2017).
You’re waiting in line when someone cuts in front of you. Frustrating, right?
Yet we do this constantly in software development. Something “urgent” arrives, and we drop everything. The work we were doing? It goes back to the queue—invisible, forgotten, accumulating.
This invisible queue is inventory. It’s hidden waste, not value. And it directly extends our cycle time.
Here’s what most teams miss: queues are mostly waiting time. We optimize for keeping people busy (easy to see) while ignoring the growing queues (hard to see). The busier we are, the more inventory we create. And the higher the Cost of Delay becomes for everything waiting.
As Donald Reinertsen writes in Principles of Product Development Flow: Queues are leading indicators of future cycle-time problems
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Many organizations are blind to the queue problem in knowledge work. What helps you see yours? Would making it visible change what you optimize for?