Why Queue Management is Important for your Scrum Team
With Inspiration from one Japanese Queueing System
Queueing is Cultural
Attitudes to queueing are bizarrely correlated to culture. Notoriously, and as verified at least by the BBC, British people pride themselves on their queueing abilities. As an Irishman myself, I believe the Irish people share that collective satisfaction of an effective and patient queue.
Why? We love the collective experience and the efficiency of it. In a queue, we self-organise as a group and quietly congratulate ourselves for the outcome. After forming, the queue lives and breathes as it moves, transmitting real-time information to the watchful, helping us all forecast how long we will wait according to our place in line. We learn a lot about the system by observing the queue.
I had always thought the Irish and the English knew how to queue, that we were world-beaters. In a Queueing Olympics, I reckoned we could compete for the gold. Oh man, was I mistaken.
Last year, I realised a long-standing ambition to visit Japan for the first time. After arriving, I encountered a pretty remarkable queueing system for the airport bus and within 5 minutes, I realised I was out of my queueing league: this queue was moving in two dimensions!
