Software teams that use Scrum hold a daily meeting of 15 minutes, “following the guideline of no problem solving during the daily scrum.” A problem that comes up is set aside and taken up right after the meeting ends, “a practice often referred to as the sixteenth minute.”
The person running the meeting is advised to “Suggest that those who are needed stay to discuss or resolve them.” Everyone else can leave.
On May 15, 2012, Raymond Chen of Microsoft explained the term on his blog The Old New Thing. In a brainstorming session, people “designate a corner of the whiteboard to be the place to ‘park’ those ideas for later consideration.” “From what I can gather,” he wrote, that corner became the parking lot, and later the name passed to the document that collects the parked ideas.
An internal Microsoft presentation he quotes advises: “Avoid using Microsoft jargon terms, such as parking lot and dogfood.” Chen found no older source for the term.
California’s open-meeting law for local bodies, the Brown Act, requires the agenda to be posted “at least 72 hours before a regular meeting.” With few exceptions, it limits the meeting to that agenda: “No action or discussion shall be undertaken on any item not appearing on the posted agenda.”
When a new matter comes up, a member or the board may act “to direct staff to place a matter of business on a future agenda.”
Rule 611(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence says: “Cross-examination should not go beyond the subject matter of the direct examination and matters affecting the witness’s credibility.” The objection “beyond the scope” is familiar from courtroom dramas.
The new subject is not ruled out. “The court may allow inquiry into additional matters as if on direct examination.” The committee that drafted the rule called the question “essentially one of the order of presentation.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote a manual of parliamentary practice while he was vice president. He received his first printed copy on February 27, 1801. It says: “No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluous, or tediously.”
The House of Representatives later adopted the manual as a partial guide to its own proceedings. Its own rules provide “that remarks must be confined to the question under debate.”
For three hours after the Senate takes up its business each day, Senate Rule XIX requires that “all debate shall be germane and confined to the specific question then pending before the Senate.” The rule was proposed by Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island and adopted “by a 57-25 vote on January 23, 1964.”
It is “customarily enforced only by a call to order from the floor.” “Any Senator may request unanimous consent to speak out of order on a nongermane subject.” The Congressional Research Service adds: “In practice, the Pastore rule rarely affects what Senators speak about on the floor.”
Let’s park that. — We will set this point aside and come back to it later.
Let’s put a pin in it. — We will mark this point so that we do not forget it, and return to it later.
Hold that thought. — Please keep your point until the right moment.
I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole. — This topic could take a long time and lead us away from the agenda.
That’s out of scope for today. — It is a fair point, but it is not part of this meeting.
That deserves its own meeting. — The point matters too much to handle quickly here.
In the House of Representatives, “an amendment must address the same subject as the matter being amended.” The word for this is germane. “The germaneness rule was adopted by the House in 1789 and has remained the same since it was last changed in 1822.”
The House Rules Committee calls it “one of the key procedural differences between the House and Senate.” In the Senate, on most bills, “amendments may be offered which have no relevance to the subject matter of the bill.”
Under Robert’s Rules of Order, the motion to lay on the table sets a pending motion aside for a time. Robert’s Rules For Dummies explains: “If the motion laid on the table isn’t taken from the table by the next regular meeting, the motion dies.” The guide adds: “It’s never in order to use the motion to lay on the table to kill a motion or to delay its consideration.”
In the US Congress, the same motion works differently. The Senate glossary says that, “if adopted a motion to table permanently kills a pending matter.”
A facilitation guide from NOAA, the US federal agency for oceans and weather, says: “The facilitator can use a flip chart page, or ask the recorder to keep a sheet, labeled ‘Parking Lot.'” “Sidetrack items are placed in the parking lot and reviewed later to determine if any should be included in a future agenda.”
The guide adds that the items “need to be followed up.” The user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group warns that parking lots “can also quickly become a graveyard of questions you don’t want to deal with.”