Week 12 Field session: The defence

Eight minutes each, questions from the room, and in the best years the manager of the queue you have been measuring.

26 May 2027

This is the last session of the semester. Everybody presents, nobody leaves early, and it runs strictly to time because with this many people it simply has to.

What happens#

Everyone gets eight minutes, followed by four minutes of questions, and the whole thing runs across the full two hours with a short break in the middle. The order is drawn on the day.

Three things have to appear in your eight minutes.

1. The queue as you found it in week 1, in numbers.
2. Your change, and the predicted effect, with the arithmetic on a slide.
3. The group who waits longer, named, with a number if you have one.

A presentation missing the third is stopped and asked for it, which is uncomfortable and is a much cheaper way to find out than in the marking.

Guests#

Bring whoever runs your queue. Several students each year bring the manager of the shop, the desk supervisor, the operations lead. They are welcome, they ask the best questions in the room, and they have twice told a student their change was already tried and failed, which is the most valuable eight minutes that student had all semester.

Tell Tessa by the Monday if somebody is coming.

How the questions are marked#

Not on having an answer ready. On what you do with a question you cannot answer. Saying that a question is a good one and that it breaks your estimate is marked well. Defending a position you can see is wrong is not.

Bring#

• Slides, or paper, or nothing. Three of the best defences in this course have been given at a whiteboard.
• Your week 1 observation sheets. Somebody always asks.

What leaves the room#

Everyone else’s redesign, which is the point of doing this in a room rather than on a form, and one course that finishes where it started with a queue taken apart on a board.