The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each field session, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
We call these field sessions rather than tutorials, and the name is doing real work. A tutorial is somewhere you sit down and go over the lecture again, whereas most of these involve going outside with a stopwatch and standing next to something. Two hours a week, usually in the open air, and you should assume you will be on your feet for most of it.
Every session below tells you what to bring and what you are expected to walk out with, so please do have a quick look before you turn up. If the weather is genuinely awful we move indoors and work on somebody else's data instead, and that gets announced on the forum rather than left to chance.
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Choosing your queue
Two hours to commit to the queue you will still be measuring in week 12, and to find out why your first choice will not work.
Week 1 · 24 February 2027
The clipboard
Learning to record arrivals and services by hand, badly, and then learning what the errors were.
Week 2 · 3 March 2027
The long tail
Plotting your own service times and discovering that the average was hiding most of what matters.
Week 3 · 10 March 2027
Counting servers
A walk around four queues in the same building to work out how many servers each one really has.
Week 4 · 17 March 2027
Watching the jump
Two hours recording every instance of somebody being served out of order, and what happened next.
Week 5 · 24 March 2027
The triage table
A tabletop exercise where your group writes a triage scale, then runs a surge through it and watches it fail.
Week 6 · 31 March 2027
Filing for a number
Putting a measurement on a queue that publishes nothing, starting with a real request for its length.
Week 7 · 21 April 2027
The waiting room audit
Auditing one waiting space against the seven propositions, and separating the service from the anaesthetic.
Week 8 · 28 April 2027
Reading a scheduler trace
Finding Little's Law, the utilisation wall and starvation in a real trace from a machine with nothing to hide.
Week 9 · 5 May 2027
The post-mortem
Working through a published inquiry into a queue that failed badly, and finding the week we would have caught it.
Week 10 · 12 May 2027
The redesign studio
You pitch your one change to three people whose job is to find the group it costs.
Week 11 · 19 May 2027
The defence
Eight minutes each, questions from the room, and in the best years the manager of the queue you have been measuring.
Week 12 · 26 May 2027