Here is an absolutely cool blog entry from a Microsoft researcher who analyzes a problem he had getting lunch the other day in software development process terms. Can you tell that he spends his days creating MSF software development process methodologies? Naw.
In addition this restaurant had a broken organizational structure and poor separation of responsibilities. The "Anderson lunch project" should rightly have been the responsibility of the waiter who should have been playing the project manager role (and maybe the program manager role). The waiter should have analyzed our requirements and understood our priorities. This should have been communicated to the chefs and the order of production of our sushi should have been negotiated against the competing orders at the time. The sushi chefs should have been purely responsible for the production of sushi. They should not have had any project management, program management or scheduling responsibility. After all, they had no direct contact with the customer and as the system's capacity constrained resource, they should not have been wasting sushi making capacity trying to do anything else.