Finding
One queue, one person
Everything arrives in one place, and that place is a person.
Requests come in through several doors and leave through one. Nobody designed that; it accumulated. Each new channel was reasonable on the day it was added, and none of them came with a rule about who answers what.
The symptom people describe is being busy. The actual failure is that the work waits — not while anyone does it, but while it sits in a place where nobody is sure whether it is theirs. In most teams the waiting is a larger number than the doing, and it is the number nobody measures.
It gets worse quietly, because the fix everyone reaches for is another person on the queue. That works for about a quarter, and then there are two people who are both sure the other one saw it.
Usually shows up as response time first and as turnover second.
How it shows up
- A request arrives and three people can each explain why it is not theirs.
- The answer to "where is that" is a name rather than a place.
- Somebody schedules their holiday around a release.
- New joiners are told to just ask a particular person.
- The same question gets answered in four channels, differently.
How to put a number on it
Take three things people describe as "only one person knows that". For each, ask what happens if they are away for two weeks. If the answer contains the words sales, orders or releases, the crisis is scheduled rather than hypothetical.
Then count two numbers on the same task: hours somebody spends doing it, and hours it spends waiting in a place where nobody is sure it is theirs. The waiting is usually the larger one, and it is the one nobody records.
What to do this week
One page per process. What it does, what goes in, what comes out, the commands, and what to do when it breaks. Ten minutes to write, five to check. A hundred-page wiki is the version nobody writes and nobody reads.
A week later, hand that page to somebody who has never done the job and watch them work through it. They will trip in about three places. Write those three down. The process is now documented, and it took an afternoon rather than a quarter.
The next step
This one is worth half an hour on a call, because the fix depends entirely on which channels you have and who owns them — and that is a conversation, not a article.
Find out what this is called →