If you are on Linux or some form of Unix, install the at command. Scheduling jobs "at now" puts them into a queue, and if you want you can even give the queues names to have them go into different queues. Bonus: Configure at correctly and anything the job prints is sent as an email.

If you need something better, I would look search for job control solutions. If you don't find one that suits, you can always use a control table in a relational database for job control. That is more work, but you can allow jobs to be distributed across multiple machines in different locations.