How to manage queues in product development

During product development, queues can be inefficient due to their invisible nature. Increasing queues also take more time to respond to, manage, and provide feedback. This can cause delays in important areas of the product’s life cycle. Due to these issues, longer queues can be demotivating.

Therefore, it is important to manage queues in an efficient manner. This shot illustrates how this can be achieved.

Cumulative flow diagrams

The cumulative flow diagramgraphs queues by representing the work at any given time in a queue, its arrival time, the time this task stayed in the queue, and its departure. helps us visualize how long each task stays in the queue after arrival. This is a good way to identify changes in time duration over a time period and provides insight into the problems holding up tasks in queues.

Decreasing queue size

A good way to deal with inefficient, overloaded queues is to reduce the number of tasks per queue, rather than tackling long queues. This method addresses the demotivation caused by long queues and prevents delays.

Decreasing cycle time

We can use the cumulative flow diagrams to visualize the average time a task takes after entering queues and try to reduce its cycle time. This is one of the indicators of lagging, so doing so would help us reduce time significantly.