"Work fills the time allotted for it."
Parkinson's Law
Unless you're a British bureaucrat from 1958, there's no need to follow this law. No work is required to take all the time allotted for it.
A few words about the law
– a British historian and brilliant satirist. The quote often seriously referred to as a law begins , published on November 19, 1955, in "The Economist."
The essay has nothing to do with project management or management in general. It's a sharp satire ridiculing the bureaucracy that expands for decades without becoming any more efficient.
Parkinson explains the existence of the law through two factors:
- A bureaucrat wants to deal with subordinates, not rivals.
- Bureaucrats create work for one another.
I highly recommend reading the essay itself, but in short, it goes like this:
A bureaucrat, feeling overwhelmed, hires two subordinates to do his job. He cannot share it with already working colleagues or hire just one subordinate to share the workload – no one wants rivals. The cycle then repeats, and his employees hire staff for themselves. Now seven people are doing the work of one. Everyone is very busy, but neither the speed of work nor its quality improves.
Perhaps this situation is familiar to you, but there are many other reasons why work fills all the time up to the deadline and a little more.
How to avoid this:
1. Don’t think for others.
Don’t expect someone to show respect if you don’t show it yourself. If you want the team to take deadlines and work seriously – try to gain real commitment, not forced agreement.
2. Don’t set a deadline of "yesterday."
Firstly, this stresses everyone out, and you don’t want to work among psychopaths. Secondly, meeting a deadline of "yesterday" is impossible, which means deadlines will be missed. They’ll be missed once, twice. And what will you do then? Fire everyone? Unlikely. And if nothing happens afterward, then what? Why try to meet the deadline, let alone beat it? Maniana.
3. Don’t try to achieve 100% utilization.
For 100% workload (actually not), we invented machines, and humans need to rest. They also need to grow and wipe the dust off their keyboards. Why rush to finish a task early if a new one will come right away? Then there will certainly be no time for anything.
4. Don’t pretend that the end of the world comes after the deadline.
Firstly, that's not true, see point 2. Secondly, no one wants to be on the receiving end, and everyone builds a safety margin. The problem is that delays will still accumulate, while early finishes will not. This is well noted by in the book
5. You don't need to fix everything.
Don't draw a mythical constraints triangle and try to fit your project into it. If you want to achieve something like the Sagrada Familia, be prepared to wait a hundred years. If you need it by Thursday, be flexible.
6. Don’t encourage multitasking.
Firstly, it’s not productive. Secondly, each person solves their optimization problem. Getting 2 new assignments instead of focusing on one completed task doesn’t seem like a good idea.
7. Don’t delay approvals.
Seriously. The work takes 2 days, and then you have to wait another 2 weeks for the manager/client to review and provide feedback. Then we wonder why everyone waits until the deadline.
8. Avoid a big bang.
Don’t delay with a single large deliverable, work incrementally. It’s not a fact that the work will be done faster, but at least you will have something to use without waiting for months.
9. Don’t inflate the team.
Unless you want to be like British bureaucrats 🙂
Source: habr.com
