Week 9 Lab: Lab 9 — Where Did the Wait Go?

Audit a real appointment system's published waiting time and find the boundary it drew to get that number.

3 May 2027

Before the lab#

Find one published waiting-time figure from a real organisation — a health service, a licensing authority, a utility, a university. It must be a number they publish about themselves. Bring the source.

In the lab#

Find the boundary. In groups, take each statistic apart. Where does the clock start? Referral, or first contact, or arrival at the building, or being called from the waiting room? Where does it stop? Being seen, being treated, being discharged, the case being closed?

Almost every published figure starts its clock later than a user would, and the gap is usually where the actual waiting lives. This is not generally fraud. It is the accumulation of small, individually defensible definitional choices, each of which happened to shorten the number.

Redraw it. Choose the boundary a user would recognise — the moment they first tried to get the thing — and estimate the wait under that definition. Use Little’s Law where you can get a throughput; use published volumes where you cannot; state your uncertainty either way. You will often be off by a factor of several from the official figure, and being able to say why, mechanically, is the deliverable.

The honest column. Then the harder half, and Priya will push on this: for each system, was moving the wait actually bad for the user? An hour at home genuinely beats an hour in a corridor. Separate the two complaints — “you moved my wait” and “you moved my wait and then reported it as though it had vanished” — because only the second is clearly a failure, and conflating them makes the criticism easy to dismiss.

Afterwards#

Simulation report due Friday 17:00.

Act II closes here. You have five ordering rules and a habit of asking where the clock starts. Act III puts them into systems that are connected to other systems and full of people who have worked out what you are doing.