Parkinson's Law states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion." In many cases, this law also manifests itself as "estimates of work expand to the available (or desired) level resources."In a related publication, Parkinson related his experience with government bureaucracies and observed that a committee was always at it's largest when its influence was at its smallest. This became known as the Coefficient of Inefficiency, and was described in detail in a chapter titled Comitology in his book Parkinson's Law: The pursuit or progress.
Parkinson's law is very real and can create a tremendous amount of waste on projects and programs if not dealt with. In fact, it is Parkinson's Law that drives most managers to reorganize for the sake of reorganization. It shakes things up and sheds a dependency on old processes that are a result of bloated bureaucracies. I am personally not a fan of this approach, although I understand the driving forces and the desire for change. Instead, we should always be looking for way's to optimize our organizations, at every level, to prevent Parkinson's Law from ever taking over.
The following are simple ways to help combat Parkinson's Law:
- Schedules and deadlines should be very aggressive. Seek to get more work done than is actually possible. This said, you need to be willing to accept less than what you are asking for.
- Expose the highly critical tasks and prioritize them to the front.
- Break tasks down into short, measurable increments. Track them at the 8 - 24 hour level.
- Track metrics on how well tasks are executed, by individual (to learn capabilities, not to chastise).
- Maintain an accurate 'task backlog' by skill. This is a queue of sorts and it needs to be kept full.
- Find way's for automation and IT to replace manually intensive tasks, especially those related to quality and compliance.
