Week 11 Queue Lab: Trace the worst day back to one decision

Work through the Office's compounding-failure incident and argue for the single earlier design decision most responsible for how badly it went.

3 May 2027

The worst day had several things wrong with it at once. This lab asks you to separate the ones that were bad luck from the one that was a choice — and to argue for changing the choice.

Before the lab#

Reread the incident summary from this week’s lecture, and have your week 6 policy choice, week 8 stuck/slow rule, and week 10 Priority Lane audit ready to reference.

In the lab#

List the incident’s contributing factors separately: the volume surge (an external event, not a design choice), the dispenser jam (a recurring failure mode identified back in week 8), and the disproportionate rise in declared urgency under pressure (an added fact of this incident, not something the week 10 aggregate audit could establish on its own).

For one bounded experiment, select System Shock in the Queue Policy Lab. Under FCFS, trace SS02 and SS03 across the minute 6–10 closure: service already started finishes, but no new service starts during that window. Compare two policies and identify the longest wait and the ticket that pays for any improvement. This six-ticket scenario isolates a short closure; it does not reproduce the incident’s tripled demand or forty-minute dispenser jam. Keep those limits explicit.

Argue for one specific decision, from any earlier week, that you would change first if you could only change one thing before this happened again. It does not have to be the Priority Lane — it could be the choice not to track issued-versus-served tickets from week 9, the choice of policy from week 6, or the decision not to give the dispenser a fallback from week 8. Defend your choice by naming what, specifically, would have gone differently on this exact worst day if it had been made differently.

Then write one honest sentence about the cost: what would your proposed change have cost the Office on an ordinary day, when nothing was going wrong? A change that only pays off during a crisis and does nothing but add overhead the rest of the time is a real trade-off, not a free improvement.

Afterwards#

You now have everything the final redesign needs to draw on: a measurement method, a compared and audited set of policies, a standard for honest communication, a stuck/slow distinction, and one identified point of failure. Week 12 asks you to redesign the Office of Everything properly and defend it under questioning.