The whole semester on one page. Twelve weeks, what is taught, what you go and do, and what falls due.
We have put everything in one place here, largely because the question most students actually turn up with is not what the course is about at all. It is whether they can fit the thing around a Wednesday shift, and that is a perfectly reasonable question to want answered before you enrol.
February 2027
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22Lecture, Monday 22 February: The line starts hereLecture · Week 1The line starts hereFirst-come-first-served is not the natural state of a queue. It is a policy somebody chose.Read the page | 23 | 24Field session, Wednesday 24 February: Choosing your queueField session · Week 1Choosing your queueTwo 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.Read the page | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
March 2027
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1Lecture, Monday 1 March: Little's LawLecture · Week 2Little's LawYou can work out how long people are waiting without timing a single one of them.Read the page | 2 | 3Field session, Wednesday 3 March: The clipboardField session · Week 2The clipboardLearning to record arrivals and services by hand, badly, and then learning what the errors were.Read the page | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8Lecture, Monday 8 March: Variability is the taxLecture · Week 3Variability is the taxA counter running at ninety-five percent of capacity is not a well-run counter. It is one bad morning from collapse.Read the page | 9 | 10Field session, Wednesday 10 March: The long tailField session · Week 3The long tailPlotting your own service times and discovering that the average was hiding most of what matters.Read the page | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15Lecture, Monday 15 March: One line or manyLecture · Week 4One line or manyThe banks changed to a single serpentine line and the supermarkets never did. Both were right.Read the page | 16 | 17Field session, Wednesday 17 March: Counting serversField session · Week 4Counting serversA walk around four queues in the same building to work out how many servers each one really has.Read the page | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22Lecture, Monday 22 March: Priority, and who pays for itLecture · Week 5Priority, and who pays for itEvery queue jump is paid for by somebody standing further back who was never told.Read the page | 23 | 24Field session, Wednesday 24 March: Watching the jumpField session · Week 5Watching the jumpTwo hours recording every instance of somebody being served out of order, and what happened next.Read the page | 25 | 26Due, Friday 26 March: The Measured Queue25%Due · Week 5The Measured QueueObserve one real queue for at least 90 minutes and report its arrival rate, service rate, utilisation and mean wait, with the method behind each figure.Read the page | 27 | 28 |
| 29Lecture, Monday 29 March: TriageLecture · Week 6TriageEmergency medicine solved the ethics of priority in public and wrote the answer down. It is worth reading.Read the page | 30 | 31Field session, Wednesday 31 March: The triage tableField session · Week 6The triage tableA tabletop exercise where your group writes a triage scale, then runs a surge through it and watches it fail.Read the page |
April 2027
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19Lecture, Monday 19 April: The queues with no visible frontLecture · Week 7The queues with no visible frontA visible line is a courtesy. The queues that decide the most about a life publish nothing.Read the page | 20 | 21Field session, Wednesday 21 April: Filing for a numberField session · Week 7Filing for a numberPutting a measurement on a queue that publishes nothing, starting with a real request for its length.Read the page | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26Lecture, Monday 26 April: The felt waitLecture · Week 8The felt waitAn unexplained two minutes is longer than an explained five. That is not a failure of the customer.Read the page | 27 | 28Field session, Wednesday 28 April: The waiting room auditField session · Week 8The waiting room auditAuditing one waiting space against the seven propositions, and separating the service from the anaesthetic.Read the page | 29 | 30Due, Friday 30 April: Whose Time It Was20%Due · Week 8Whose Time It WasAn essay of 1200 to 1800 words arguing about how one queue distributes waiting, with evidence and the strongest case against you stated in full.Read the page |
May 2027
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3Lecture, Monday 3 May: Machines that waitLecture · Week 9Machines that waitYour laptop is running a dozen queues right now and its scheduler faces exactly the problem the passport office does.Read the page | 4 | 5Field session, Wednesday 5 May: Reading a scheduler traceField session · Week 9Reading a scheduler traceFinding Little's Law, the utilisation wall and starvation in a real trace from a machine with nothing to hide.Read the page | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10Lecture, Monday 10 May: When the queue is the hazardLecture · Week 10When the queue is the hazardA crowd crush is a queueing failure, and the arithmetic that predicts it is the arithmetic from week 3.Read the page | 11 | 12Field session, Wednesday 12 May: The post-mortemField session · Week 10The post-mortemWorking through a published inquiry into a queue that failed badly, and finding the week we would have caught it.Read the page | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17Lecture, Monday 17 May: Abolishing the queueLecture · Week 11Abolishing the queueAppointments, lotteries and auctions do not remove waiting. They change who does it and what it costs them.Read the page | 18 | 19Field session, Wednesday 19 May: The redesign studioField session · Week 11The redesign studioYou pitch your one change to three people whose job is to find the group it costs.Read the page | 20 | 21Due, Friday 21 May: The Queue Journal20%Due · Week 11The Queue JournalEleven weekly entries of 100 to 250 words on queues you were in or watched, plus a closing note, submitted once as a single document.Read the page | 22 | 23 |
| 24Lecture, Monday 24 May: What you can see nowLecture · Week 12What you can see nowA last hour on what changes once you cannot stand in a line without reading it.Read the page | 25 | 26Field session, Wednesday 26 May: The defenceField session · Week 12The defenceEight minutes each, questions from the room, and in the best years the manager of the queue you have been measuring.Read the page | 27 | 28Due, Friday 28 May: The Redesign35%Due · Week 12The RedesignA 2000 word proposal for one change to the queue you measured, with the predicted effect worked out, plus an eight minute defence in week 12.Read the page | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
| Week | Lecture | Field session | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| 122 Feb | The line starts here | Choosing your queue | – |
| 21 Mar | Little's Law | The clipboard | – |
| 38 Mar | Variability is the tax | The long tail | – |
| 415 Mar | One line or many | Counting servers | – |
| 522 Mar | Priority, and who pays for it | Watching the jump | The Measured Queue 25% |
| 629 Mar | Triage | The triage table | – |
| Mid-semester break, two weeks. Nothing is due. | |||
| 719 Apr | The queues with no visible front | Filing for a number | – |
| 826 Apr | The felt wait | The waiting room audit | Whose Time It Was 20% |
| 93 May | Machines that wait | Reading a scheduler trace | – |
| 1010 May | When the queue is the hazard | The post-mortem | – |
| 1117 May | Abolishing the queue | The redesign studio | The Queue Journal 20% |
| 1224 May | What you can see now | The defence | The Redesign 35% |
What the dates commit to#
None of the dates on this page are typed out by hand, which is deliberate. The
table is generated from the lecture, session and assessment pages themselves,
so a date can only be wrong here if it is also wrong there, and spec/course-shape.test.ts fails the build if the
twelve weeks stop lining up with the course record.
That is not a small thing on a course website. A timetable is the page students plan a semester against, and a stale one is worse than no timetable at all, because it is believed.
Reading the load#
| Load | Weeks | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 1, 2, 12 | Choosing a queue, one clipboard exercise, the defence |
| Steady | 3, 4, 8, 9, 10 | A lecture, a field session, one journal entry |
| Heavy | 5, 6, 7, 11 | The above plus an assessment inside two weeks |
The two genuinely busy stretches are weeks 4 to 5, when The Measured Queue lands on top of the pooling material, and weeks 10 to 12, when the journal, the studio and the defence arrive together. Neither is an accident and both are survivable, but plan the second one before week 9 rather than during it.
If you miss a week#
What to do, in order
Field sessions are where the data comes from, so a missed one costs you more than a missed lecture. In order of what to do about it.
- Tell Priya the same week. Most sessions can be repeated with another group or done alone with a sheet she will send you.
- Get the week’s measurements anyway, even roughly. An entry in the journal saying you collected thirty arrivals instead of sixty is worth far more than a gap.
- If the site itself has fallen through rather than your attendance, that is a different problem and the policies page covers it. It is not a penalty and it happens most years.
Lectures are recorded, with one exception. Week 7 is a guest lecture and it is not recorded at the guest’s request.