The sweeping theory is really what happens. Except I don\'t think it is strictly periodic...
Lets try and visualize the layout of the adjudication-ready room. This area I think is referred to at INS as the "work distribution area". Imagine several shelves or holding areas each marked by a Month and Year pertaining to Month of RD.
All cases are held in the area called "file room" while still waiting for something. Some of the possible reasons for wait could be A-file, Underlying I-140 approval notice, FP results, FBI Background check etc.
Once a case receives all required documentation and is deemed adjudication-ready, the file is moved by the clerical staff to the appropriate shelf in the "work distribution area". I think, this part of the process is where cases can mistakenly go to a different month\'s shelf than the actual month of RD. For example, a June case can easily end up in the pile for July and vice versa because of human clerical error. If you extrapolate that possibility, you see the potential for a case to end up in a shelf that is a few months ahead or behind where it actually should be.
When an adjudication officer has completed adjudicating all previously assigned cases s/he makes a request for "work allocation" to the work distribution area (possibly thru a supervisor). They do not just walk in and pick up cases. That would open room for indiscipline, chaos and other possibilities.
To satisfy this "work allocation" request the folks manning the work distribution area look at the shelf with the earliest month of RD which has cases lying in it and pick those cases for allocation. Lets say hypothetically that, at a snapshot in time, there are 0 cases ready for March and earlier, 10 cases ready for April, 20 cases ready for May, 40 cases ready for June and so on and so forth. If the "work allocation request" is usually for say 15 cases per request, they would pick the 10 April cases + 5 May cases = 15 total cases. Lets say at the same time or right after this request there are 2 more requests. The 1st request of those 2 is allocated 15 remaining May cases while the 2nd of the 2 gets 15 out of the 40 ready cases for June.
Lets say a week passes until the next set of "work allocation requests". In the meantime it conceivable that a few more Feb, March, April, May and subsequent months\' cases make their way over to the shelves. The next "work allocation request" will be satisfied by exhausting the earliest of the cases until the request is satisfied.
Hopefully by this time the 3 previous officers in our example finish adjudicating their cases(They say an officer spends a few hours on each case on the average). So, we would see the May and June cases allocated to those officers being reported as approved as on wave. Then we would see in another wave the approvals from the second set of officers who were allocated earlier cases that became ready after the first 3 officers\' request was satisfied. These would possibly be Feb, March and April cases. This cycle continues until each months cases are exhausted or are too small for us to track here. Because of this process which is continuous, we see approvals in a few months\' span at any given time.
What is open to question to my mind is this :
1) Is work allocation periodic? I mean, is work allocated to all officers at the same time? If so, that would explain why in some weeks we see 15 or 20 approvals only while we see 30+ approvals in the next week or 2. I noticed this happened in late January and in this current week in February. This weeks approval count is between 15-20 while last week was 37. If that still does not explain a lull in approval in the first week after work allocation, let me explain further. Lets say officers work on adjudicating the oldest to newest of the cases assigned to them . So, in the first week they would probably adjudicate Jan, Feb or March cases. We don\'t see those approvals possibly because we do not track them in our lists and folks in that timeperiod don\'t post their approvals.
However, I personally feel that this onetime allocation for the whole dept is not realistic just because approvals are so subjective. You just will not be able to lay a limit down on the number of cases an officer should adjudicate in a given timeperiod. Not unless they are tracking productivity metrics. That opens a disturbing possibility of generating RFE\'s to meet productivity norms.
2) Is the lull in approvals for certain weeks a pattern? Are we going to see many approvals for the next 2 weeks because of this low approvals week? Who knows?
Sorry for rambling. Was trying to make a point. Do not know If I got it across.