People, process and technology · The North
Past a certain point, small increases in demand impact your operation disproportionately hard. The impact is invisible, but exponential. This model estimates the critical points at which your team begins to struggle with your current operations design.
Where demand outstrips capacity you do not always need to recruit more people. There are very effective design solutions that do not involve increasing headcount.
First, what do you call them?
Matters, cases, files, jobs, tickets, clients — whatever your team says.
The team
Time on the work itself, not hours attended.
The work
Its whole life, not per month. Everything the team spends on one from opening to closing.
Uneven work lowers the ceiling. It shifts every number below.
If you don't know the hours
Your own estimate of the threshold. The model turns it into hours for you.
We'll show the curve for your team, and give you a copy to keep.
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What this is. A rough illustration, not an analysis. The figures you put in are estimates and the output should be read as one.
How it is worked out. Waiting time is modelled one queue per team member rather than a shared queue, because in most professional service teams work is allocated to a named person and stays with them. A pooled team absorbs pressure better than this model shows, but has other trade-offs.
About the two dashed lines. The curve has no step change in it — waiting rises faster with every additional unit of work, all the way along. The lines are conventional markers, placed where the effect has grown large enough to be felt: roughly two and a half times, and six times, the wait of a lightly loaded team. The solid line is different — it is the point where the work needed exceeds the hours available, and past it no waiting time can be calculated at all, because the queue never settles.
What it assumes. A caseload that is roughly stable rather than growing, and everyday variation in arrivals and job sizes. Real professional work is usually lumpier than that, which means the true curve is steeper than the one shown, not gentler.