Friday, June 7, 2019

Lean Lunch Lines


Budapest
“This doesn’t look good,” Tom said, pointing out six signs high on the wall, side-by-side.  Three said “Pork and Beef.” Three said “Fish and Vegan.” Below each sign a serving station was being set up. Lunch break started in a half an hour. There were over 2000 people to feed, and the pouring rain meant any outdoor food options were unlikely to attract much traffic.

We weren’t the only ones who noticed. Lines began to form at the food stations; the queues for meat grew especially long. We joined one of the three long lines and moved slowly to the front. At the food station we had several choices to make – so it took a while to be served.

I did the math. Each meat station was serving about 4 people per minute, so the three meat stations might serve roughly 750 people in an hour – maybe 1000 if the service got faster. From the short lines at the fish/vegan stations, I inferred that they might account for 15-20% of the demand, leaving over 1500 people to be served by the three lines offering meat. The 90-minute lunch break was probably not going to be long enough.

Sure enough, just before the sessions were set to resume, the following tweet announced that the afternoon talks would be delayed by a half hour:

At a conference whose attendees pride themselves on agility and thus should understand queuing theory, this was a big disappointment. In Lean we have a mantra: “Go and See.” It means go to the place where delays are happening and see for yourself what is going on.  I can’t help thinking that if an observant person with authority to change things had taken a close look at the lines on the first day, it might have been possible to improve the process and keep the conference on schedule. For example, they might have switched two of the three fish/vegan lines to meat, or perhaps they could have served all types of food from all six food stations, or shortened the time it took to serve a meal.

There was a second day to the conference; and I assumed that lessons had been learned, and queues would be shorter. As lunch time approached, there were four more signs posted high on a wall at the far end of the room, perpendicular to the first six signs. Two said “Pork and Beef.” Two said “Fish and Vegan.” So now there were five long lines for the 80% or so of the attendees who preferred meat, and five short lines for the others. An observant caterer would not have added more fish/vegan lines; with a total of ten lines, no more than two should have been devoted to the meatless meals preferred by perhaps 20% of the attendees. Of course, that ratio was not precise; for example, although I preferred meat, I opted for the very short line serving fish, and I’m sure I was not alone.

The real test of lunch line flow is this: How long do attendees have to wait in line to obtain the food of their choice? At a conference where organizers understand queuing theory, attendees should not have to wait in a food queue for more than 10 minutes – or maybe up to 15 minutes at peak times. Asking people to stand in line for longer periods shows a lack of respect for their time.

Zürich
The following week we attended DevOps Days in Zürich. There were roughly 400 attendees, and as lunch approached I noticed two stations being stocked with food. I wondered how many people a station might serve per minute. If it was four per minute (as in Budapest) and there were only two stations serving lunch, I speculated that it could take 50 minutes to serve everyone – and that’s a long time for anyone to stand in line.

But I was wrong. Julia Faust, who helped plan the lunch, explained to me: “DevOps is about FLOW, so we want lunch lines that flow. We have four food stations – not two – and we have the same food at each station so anyone can get in any line. We limited the number of food offerings to be sure service is fast; we expect each station to serve about ten people per minute. We think that the four food stations can feed up to 40 people per minute, so 400 people could be fed in ten to fifteen minutes. We have also placed appetizers around on the tables so people can eat something before getting in line. We are hoping that the lines will form gradually and remain very short.”

Sure enough, there were almost no lines at the food stations, and everyone was served within fifteen minutes. Perhaps no one noticed that there was more time for networking and lunch-time gatherings, but to me it was clear that the organizers of this conference understood queuing theory and respected the time of attendees.

Lyon
We went to the MiXiT conference in Lyon the following week, where about 1000 attendees were expecting lunch. I was delighted to see that people were able to help themselves to food rather than have it served. I never could understand why most European conferences I attend find it necessary to have someone serve food and pour coffee. After all, just about every European hotel I stay at seems to have a breakfast buffet, so there's nothing inherently difficult about self-service meals.

There were two long food tables, one on each side of the lunchroom. Again, I did the math. To feed 1000 people in 15 minutes, the tact time (or output rate) for each table would have to be about 32 people per minute. With a line on each side of each table, the tact time should be about 16 people per minute for each of the four lines. But my calculation was wrong – there would be only one line per table, not two, so a 15 minute line would require that each line serve 32 people per minute. Clearly this was not going to happen.

“Why not pull the tables away from the wall a bit further and allow people to get food from both sides?” I asked the gentleman in charge of lunch.

“That’s not possible,” he replied. “We need access to one side of each table for replenishment.”

“But,” I said, “Then the lines would move twice as fast.”

“They are fast enough,” he said. “Yesterday the lines were 35 minutes long; they don't need to be faster.”

I saw tables stacked high with boxes and bags of food, with a long line of people moving past each table, picking up three or four individually packaged items. On the other side, a few people watched and occasionally replenished one or the other stacks of food. They could have easily interrupted a line to add a depleted item – this happens all the time at breakfast buffets. There was no reason (other than habit) to limit each table to one line. A conference that respects its attendees should optimize lunch lines for the convenience of attendees, and find other ways to optimize the convenience of the people serving food.

A Footnote on Diversity
Every software conference I attend broadcasts a policy encouraging diversity. I welcome that because I am different than most attendees – I am 75 years old (and proud of it). But somehow, my kind of diversity has not been considered at most conferences. Consider the first conference we stopped at this spring – Agile Lean Ireland. There were virtually no chairs except in rooms where talks were held; everyone was expected to stand during coffee and lunch breaks. So Tom and I ate – usually alone – in a conference room.

Lunch was served at multiple locations strung out down a long hallway. The station furthest from the conference rooms opened first, to encourage people to move to the most remote station. This might have been a good idea, except for one thing – I found myself swept up in a swarm of attendees racing down the hallway to get served first. After a short time, I just stopped – I had gone far enough. I turned to the servers at a nearby lunch station (which was not yet opened) and said “Give me food. Now. I can’t go any further.”

The gentleman I spoke to was about to refuse, but his wiser companion indicated he should go ahead. As he served lunch for Tom and me, I smiled gratefully at the woman who had broken the rules. Then she said to the nearby people hoping to get some food, “This location is not yet open. You have to keep moving to the end of the hall.” Sigh.

Long walks, long lines, no chairs, and toilets up or down stairs are all indications that a conference does not really welcome older, less agile attendees. Of the four conferences that Tom and I attended in April and May, DevOps Days in Zürich was the only one which had none of these limitations, and thus made us feel the most welcome.