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.
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 →