Failure to address this issue will result in massive queues, which in turn result in expensive delays and missed schedules. Furthermore, even when companies recognize the importance of preventing overloads, they are likely to analyze their process by using deterministic models that are so inherently flawed, they will never result in an effective development process. The sad result is that develop ment process overloads are a common, chronic, and expensive problem. Yet this problem is not new. Intelligent people have long tried to meticulously forecast demand and carefully plan capacity, but they still have overloads.
Companies match capacity and demand, yet things are always late.
For some reason, the math doesn't seem to work. I maintain that most companies are using the wrong paradigm for managing development process overloads. This incorrect paradigm inexorably leads to solutions that simply can never work. This article presents another way of thinking about managing product development capacity, using the perspective of queueing theory. The article explains how such a perspective leads to a totally different approach to capacity management and illustrates how design reuse helps prevent queueing problems in design.