Queue Time, Flow Management, and the True Path to Productivity

Mark Putnam

You know, Olivia, there’s this story from my days at a university that stick with me. New president arrives, does the classic listening tour with the deans—figuring out what’s really going on, right? And you expect to hear about budgets, faculty battles, enrollment woes... but the number one complaint? The time it took to hire someone. Not the salary, not finding top candidates, just... waiting. I remember staring at this process map we made—thirty-two swimlanes, just for basic hiring. The work itself only took a few hours, but months could crawl by before anyone started. That kind of glacial queue time—it wasn’t bad quality, it was the waiting that drove people up the wall.

Olivia Carter

That totally tracks with everything I keep seeing, Mark. Like, people generally don’t lose their minds when something’s a bit imperfect—but make them wait in the dark, weeks on end, for any response? That’s the trigger. You can bust your tail on great outcomes, but if requests just sit there—it erodes trust faster than almost anything else.

Mark Putnam

Exactly. And the queue is invisible, most times. Folks see the end result and think, “Wow, that took forever.” It doesn’t matter that the actual work was quick. When you look at customer satisfaction, it’s not usually about “Did you do a great job?”—it’s, “Why did I have to escalate this five times?” Escalation becomes a symptom of broken process flow, not a lack of skill or drive.

Olivia Carter

And that’s when the politics kick in, right? One person gets noisy, leadership thinks “Oh, must be a staff capacity thing.” But really, most delays are systemic—roots in how badly the process is structured, and how long work just sits there idle.

Mark Putnam

That’s the trap. Everyone wants a simple answer—just add more people. But if the system stays broken, all you do is give more folks reasons to wait. Queue time is the real trust killer; quality almost always comes second. And like we talked about a couple episodes ago when we discussed ERP failures—it’s the silent waits that kill credibility, not the headline errors.

Olivia Carter

So let’s break this down—why is flow so broken in the first place? Honestly, it’s way more than just being, like, stuck in a long line at the DMV. Most universities—and so many big organizations—just inherited these ancient, risk-averse structures. You know, steps upon steps, everyone covering their bases in a million different silos.

Mark Putnam

I’ve lost count of how often flow is choked by handoffs. You get a request, it hops from one person’s inbox to the next, each protecting their little turf. And every handoff? Another chance for things to stall, defects to creep in, or something to get misunderstood. Most steps aren’t about adding value—they’re just layers of “bureaucratic tail covering.”

Olivia Carter

Queue jumping is the one that gets under my skin. It’s like, the minute someone with enough influence says, “This one’s urgent,” suddenly the regular order just breaks down. It might get that one person’s thing done faster, but it—actually, it kind of wrecks everything for everyone else, right?

Mark Putnam

That’s the hard truth. I’ve seen it firsthand—political queue-jumping turns minor annoyances into full-on crises. All those little exceptions, made for “VIPs,” undermine every promise of fairness. It starts this domino effect, where the only way to get served is having the loudest advocate—or the best connections. Predictability, and trust, evaporate.

Olivia Carter

Exactly. And every time a process gets another approval or check bolted onto it, nobody questions if that extra document or sign-off even means anything anymore. You just end up with a flow that’s so muddied, nobody actually owns the whole journey. Departments see their little pieces, but for anyone outside, it’s just one big black hole.

Mark Putnam

Which is why, if you want to fix this, the fix isn’t “more people” or “fancier tech”—it’s radical structural honesty about what actually matters from start to finish.

Olivia Carter

You know, all this waiting doesn’t just tick people off. It kinds of poisons the whole work culture. When I was in college, the student IT help desk had a reputation—maybe not for incompetence, but for making you wait. One time my roommate’s WiFi went out—it was like a two-hour fix, tops, but it just sat in the queue. Four days later, she’s still offline. It all escalated: both of us emailing, her parents get involved, suddenly it’s bumped to campus leadership. And everyone’s mad. But it wasn’t about the fix. It was the dead air.

Mark Putnam

That feels familiar. Waiting generates anxiety—a sense of lost control, almost like you’ve been forgotten. Once escalation becomes normal, politics takes over as the tool for getting anything done. Then the real work—needs, strategy—gets shoved aside for who can shout the loudest.

Olivia Carter

Right, and to outsiders it just looks like IT or HR is overloaded. But go in the weeds and you realize: half the team is blocked, stuck waiting for someone else to move their piece. Nobody’s sure who actually owns what, so the most urgent thing is the thing getting political heat, not what makes sense for the mission. Productivity tanks, trust tanks, everyone feels burned out—even though it’s not really about capacity at all.

Mark Putnam

That blocked capacity is what always gets misdiagnosed. Teams look overwhelmed, but it’s not about number of people—it’s chaos in structure, missing ownership, and overgrown, unexamined processes. You fix that, and suddenly the “staffing crisis” just sort of... fades away.

Olivia Carter

So Mark, how can organizations fix these problems.

Mark Putnam

Let’s talk about that. People throw around Lean Six Sigma frameworks—sometimes the jargon gets in the way, but the principles are dead simple. It all boils down to simplification, not just automation or throwing more heads at the problem. The first step? Visualize the whole process, end to end. Map it, measure everything—queue aging, work in progress, cycle time. The uncomfortable truth is, most waiting isn’t about resources. It’s about structural waste.

Olivia Carter

It feels kind of humbling, right? Like, dashboard metrics that actually matter aren’t just “How many requests did you close this month?” but “How many are sitting, untouched, aging out?” And once you see that data, there’s honestly no place to hide. If something’s sitting in a black hole for days... you’ve got your culprit.

Mark Putnam

Toyota’s ideas are instructive here—even if people kind of roll their eyes at manufacturing metaphors. “Just-in-Time,” “Kaizen,” even the Andon cord—these aren’t about fancy tech, they’re about clear accountability and radical step ownership. We did this at the university when faculty hires were out of control. Assigning a single process owner—and actually empowering them—cut the turnaround time by weeks. Not because people worked harder, but because things actually flowed.

Olivia Carter

And if you make a tiny, skilled team to handle the wild, political escalations? You protect the main operation’s flow. Then the exceptions become data, not just chaos. That’s... I mean, that’s a legit dashboard upgrade right there.

Mark Putnam

That's right, Olivia.

Olivia Carter

Let’s get real about AI. Like, ever since GenAI took off after 2022, there’s this huge buzz that “AI will solve our productivity crisis!” But after binging through those economic impact reports, the takeaway is—if you don’t do the hard work of simplifying first, AI’s just going to automate your waste. It’ll run those pointless approvals and throw digital muscle behind broken flows.

Mark Putnam

That’s precisely it. The people who actually delivered the 1993 Internet boom didn’t just slap technology onto old workflows. They deleted steps. They removed layers. If the iPhone was about access, the real economic transformation—the one that dropped inflation, boosted GDP—came from doing less, not just faster. And now, industry after industry is relearning: AI plus unnecessary process equals... fancy inefficiency.

Olivia Carter

The Toyota examples still ring true—Kaizen, Andon cords, supplier rationalization... Every big leap has come from asking “Does this step need to exist?” and then being bold enough to pull it out. And if nobody owns a piece of the process? Delete it. Don’t just automate it. Test out what happens if you run a process minus the questionable step. If it works? Leave it gone.

Mark Putnam

Accountability is the real missing ingredient. You can have AI, the best people, all the dashboards—but unless someone is truly empowered to own the process start to finish, nothing flows and trust stays broken. That’s the linchpin. Automation, talent, headcount... it’s all secondary to radical simplification and single-point responsibility.

Olivia Carter

The bottom line, then? If institutions want real transformation—higher ed or anywhere else—it’s not just about more tech or “moving to AI.” It’s about the courage to rip out dead weight processes, focus on what moves the mission, and make sure every step is justified. Take that approach, and AI finally has a shot at being the productivity game-changer everyone hopes for.

Mark Putnam

That’s the future I’d invest in, Olivia. And honestly, that’s probably a pretty good place to leave it for today.

Olivia Carter

Yeah, let’s wrap up there. Thanks for joining us, everyone—we’ll keep digging into the real lessons underneath the tech headlines in future episodes. Mark, always great talking with you.

Mark Putnam

Likewise, Olivia. Looking forward to next time. Take care, everyone.