Parkinson’s Law
Author: Torgeir Páll Gíslason
Parkinson's Law is as defined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". That is, work takes as long as the time it's given. People plan according to how much time they have and how close it is to the deadline. When it comes closer to the deadline, people have to start making "choices" and "tradeoffs" as they must accomplish the assignment by the deadline. In recent years this law has been studied to try to make workers and students more efficient and waste as little time as possible. 2
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History
Origin Parkinson's Law was first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in "The Economist", in an essay he wrote for it in 1955. In the essay he shares a story of a woman whose only task in a day is to send a postcard, a task that takes a busy person around three minutes to do. This woman however spends an hour to find the card, half an hour to look for her glasses, an hour and a half writing the card, twenty minutes to decide if she should take an umbrella to walk to the mailbox and so on until this simple task has taken her the entire day. 1
Author Cyril Northcote Parkinson, often referred to as C. Northcote Parkinson, was born on July 30, 1909 in Durham England and died March 9, 1993. He was a British historian and an author. He received a Ph.D in history from Kings College, London, in 1935. After which he taught at multiple schools in England, along with teaching in Malaya, now Malaysia, from 1950 to 1958. His comments regarding the nature of bureaucracy are based on his experiences as a British army staff officer during the second World War. He said that administrators work for each other so they can multiply the number of subordinates and enhance their prestige. 5
Theory
In the article, Parkinson's Law, from 1955, Parkinson puts forth two factors. The first factor states: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. The second factor states: Officials make work for each other. These factors are explained with "The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates" and "The Law of Multiplication of Work"
The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates To understand factor one, imagine a civil servant named A, who is overworked. This overwork being real, or imaginary is irrelevant. However, there are three possible solutions for him. 1) He could resign. 2) He could ask to split his work with a colleague called B. 3) He could demand to get two new subordinates called C and D. There are close to no examples in civil service history of A not choosing the third option. As if he resigns he loses his pension rights. If he has B appointed on the same level as himself, he is only bringing in competition for promotion. Therefore, A would always choose to have two subordinates working under him. By dividing his work between C and D he will be the only man who knows both categories. Along with adding employees under him in the hierarchy. It is important to understand that C and D must be appointed together. If C would be appointed alone then he alone would divide the work with A and have almost equal status within the hierarchy. The same position that B would have gotten in the second option. This position being more important as C would be the only employee who could succeed A. Therefore, the subordinates must be at least two and possibly more, to be kept in order by the fear of one another for the promotion. When C complains of being overworked, A will recommend the appointment of E, F, G and H as assistants for C and D to secure his own promotion and position.
The Law of Multiplication of Work Now there are seven employees doing the work that was once done by A. That's were factor two comes in. As all seven men make enough work for each other that they are all busy and A is working harder than ever. An example of factor two is: A document can come before each and every one of them. First official E decides that the document is F's area, who writes up a draft reply and hands it to C, who consults whith D, who hands it to G to deal with. At this point G goes on leave and hands the file to H, who writes minutes, which is handed to D and signed before it is returned to C, C then revises the draft and hands the new version to A. Now A has many things on his mind, he is managing the team along with other tasks. He has every reason to trust his employers and sign the document without reading it. However, if A reads through the draft and deletes the paragraphs written by C and H, restoring the document to the first instance, written by F. Now A has amended the document to the original one and as if C and H nonexistence. This means that more people have produced far more work at a longer time to get the same result. Now everyone have been doing work and everyone has done their best but it still yields the same result as when only A did the job.
The Formula
Parkinson supports his statements by pointing out the vast increase of admiralty officials, dockyard officials and dockyard clerks for the British Royal Navy, along with the sharp decrease of officers in the Royal Navy, as well as ships in the period from year 1914 to 1928. In 1914 the Navy had 2,000 admiralty officials, 62 ships and 146,000 officers along with 57,000 dockyard workers and 3,249 dockyard officials. Fourteen years later in 1928, the admiralty officials had increased to 3,569, dockyard officials to 4,558 and dockyard workers to 62,439. Meanwhile the number of ships had been reduced to 20 and the number of officers to 100,000. Parkinson notes that this growth was unrelated to any possible work increase, yet on average the number of admiralty officials grew by 5.6% each year. Therefore, he questioned if this rise in the total number of civil servants could be explained in any other way than then assuming that such number will always increase by a law governing its growth. As this time period was one of great development in naval technique, Parkinson also looked at the number of colonial office officials from the years 1935 to 1954. It was noted that the department's responsibilities were not constant in that period. In 1935 there were 372 colonial office officials, and in 1939 when colonial territories had not changed much neither in area or population, the number of colonial office officials had grown to 450. By the year 1943 the colonial territories were considerably diminished, yet the number of officials had grown to 817. By 1947 the colonial territories had grown again, as well as the number of officials that had grown to 1,139. After that the territories decreased year by year, yet in 1954 the number of officials grew to 1,661. This growth gives an average increase of 5.89% every year. A figure notably similar to the increase of admiralty officials from 1914 to 1928. Parkinson explained that in any public administrative department the staff increase is expected to follow the formula seen in figure 1. To see the percentage increase the formula in figure 2 can be used. Parkinson concluded that the outcome will prove to be between 5.17% and 6.56%, unrelated to any change in the amount of work that has to completed.1
Practice
In real life situations, when given more time for a project than needed under normal circumstances to finish the project, the project expands in scope. As in the example given by by C. Northcote Parkinson, every aspect of the project can take longer but the project can also grow into a larger project. Often when project grows in scope while it is ongoing it can be useful in the longer run but it often does not bring you closer to completing the original project. For example, a team is given two weeks to fix a bug that normally takes a few hours to fix. As the team has more than enough time to fix the bug they start looking into other issues related to the project as they have extra time . While they are looking into those issues they start looking for the root cause and other possible bugs. Even though fixing related issues can be useful for the project in the long run, the generous time frame given in the beginning is not benefiting the original task of fixing a known bug.
Procrastination Apart from the project expanding and becoming more complex, Procrastination is also a large part of Parkinson's Law. When people know that they have enough time to finish a project, it can motivate them to leave the work undone until the last minute. These delays in starting the work means that the time required to do the project expands. 2 This happens because approaching deadlines can be motivating. The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that there exists a relationship between arousal and behavioral task performance. Therefore there is an optimal level of arousal for optimal performance. So as the deadline approaches it can work as the arousal needed for optimal performance. 3
Parkinson's Law of Triviality Parkinson's Law is often thought of in regard of individual productivity, but another dimension of it is in group settings. Parkinson's Law of Triviality is the act of time wasting on non-essential details of a project, while more important matters are not attended to. This is also known as bike shedding. The term bike shedding comes from C. Northcote Parkinson's observation on a team tasked with approving plans for a nuclear power plant. Parkinson observed that the team spent a lot of time on relatively unimportant aspects of the project, notably the bicycle storage shed, leaving less time to design the nuclear plant. Parkinson's Law of Triviality is also associated with social loafing, that is that people tend to put in less effort when working in groups then they would if they were working alone. 4
Implementation
Using Parkinson's Law to your advantage
Knowing Parkinson's Law and how it works is not enough to prevent the project from being unfinished right before the deadline and scramble to get it finished in time. However, knowing how it works awards the option to prepare for it. It is generally unhelpful to start to combat Parkinson's Law after the project is underway. It is usually most productive to start it during the project kickoff. In the project kickoff expectations can be set on how to approach and conquer milestones in the project, for example when scope can get out of hand and procrastination can become a factor. To actively make sure this does not become a factor these points should be discussed in the project kickoff 2. However, no matter how much scheduling is done, it will not help if the wrong people are on the team or if the people on the team don't know what is expected of them or others. 6
Clearly outline the vision and drivers At the beginning of a project it should be made clear what the project's value is, this is the vision, and why this project fits the team that works on it and the organization that owns it, this is called drivers, it is helpful to make sure these things are clear to the team for the team to see the value of their work and to motivate them. If this is not done, for example if an employee is given a task with the instructions, "no rush, just do it when you have time", he has no idea of the importance or why the task has to be done. Therefore, he lacks the motivation to get it done in an efficient manner.
Clarify roles and responsibilities For any project with different team members, it is important to make it clear where everyone fits into the team. It can be useful to use the DACI framework to establish roles within the team for group work and for making decisions. The roles within the DACI framework are as follows: Driver, this team member is responsible for communicating with stakeholders, collecting information and make sure decisions are made in time. Approver, is tasked with making decisions. Contributors, these team members have expertise that can influence decisions. Informed, these team members should be informed of the final decision. By using a framework like the "DACI" it shows the team how their role fits in and helps prevent team members from blaming each other along with preventing social loafing, as they are held more accountable for their responsibilities and contributions. Along with that it helps streamlining expectations around communication and feedback. This framework clearly identifies different roles and responsibilities within the team. This kind of framework eliminates lot of revisions and suggestions that can often cause projects to expand.
Understand what's in and what's out of the scope Remembering that Parkinson's Law is not just another word for procrastination but that it states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. That is also scope creep. During the project kickoff, team members should agree what is in and what is out of the scope of the project. By establishing that from the beginning the team is better prepared to fight back against Parkinson's Law. When inevitably new suggestions or feature request come up during the project, the team can look back on the scope that was agreed upon at the project kickoff and make clear if the additional things are in or out of scope. This step can be thought of as building a box for the project. The parameters are defined to fit the projects needs. This helps to notice work expansion as it is happening instead of after it has ruined the timeline.
Identify trade-offs In any project no matter how well planned, things can still happen to unexpectedly throw the project out of scope and schedule. Therefore, it is important to identify trade-offs early on. The trade-offs help identifying flexibility in the project if it comes to making last-minute adjustments. Time, scope and budget are usually the factors most looked at in this regard, and they should be prioritized during the project kickoff. For example, if the project is making a product for an upcoming conference, then time has no wiggle room, but it might be necessary to make trade-offs with the scope or the budget. Even though it can be demoralizing to think of what can go wrong at the beginning of a project it can be helpful when the critical moments get closer and difficult decisions must be made.
Set the timeline It may seem odd that setting the timeline is the last step of the project kickoff. But it can be a good way to organize projects, to plan the timeline in the end, after the team has agreed on the scope. When outlining the timeline, the milestones and deadlines should be identified, and group projects and group goals should be broken down into subgroups. This brakes down larger projects and makes them more achievable as well as creating the sense of urgency to start working on the project. This means that the first part of the project is in near future even though the main project deadline is far away. 2
References
1) C. Northcote Parkinson (November 19, 1955) "Parkinson's Law", The Economist. Retrieved March 20. 2022. https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law
2) Kat Boogaard (February 12, 2022) "What is Parkinson's Law and wy is it sabotaging your productivity?", Atlassian. Retrieved March 20. 2022. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/what-is-parkinsons-law
3) Cohen R.A. (2011) Yerkes–Dodson Law. In: Kreutzer J.S., DeLuca J., Caplan B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, New York, NY. Retrieved March 20. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79948-3_1340
4) Ivy Wigmore (April, 2015) "Parkinson's law of triviality (bikeshedding)", Whatis. Retrieved March 20. 2022. https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Parkinsons-law-of-triviality-bikeshedding
5) The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (March 5. 2022) "C. Northcote Parkinson", Britannica. Retrieved March 20. 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/C-Northcote-Parkinson
6) AXELOS (2017). Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2. TSO (The Stationery Office), part of William Lea Tag
