Parkinson's law and how to manage it

Abstract

The definition of Parkinson's Law is that work expands to fill the time alotted . Cyril Northcote Parkinson, whos was a British author and historian outlined the concept in a humorous essay in The Economist in 1955. In the essay, Parkinson describes how assigned tasks will usually take up all the time available for its completion, and if more time can be made available, the task will also take up that added time. Sometimes the law is applied to limit increasing bureaucracy in a company or organisation. The growth of bureaucracy depends on mainly two factors: The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates and The Law of Multiplication of Work. The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates is the tendency of managers to hire two or more subordinates to report to them so that neither is in direct competition with the manager themself; and the fact that bureaucrats create work for other bureaucrats . The Law of Multiplication of Work states that people will create deliverables for each other by complicating it to keep everyone occupied. Employees are the overworked, lacking resources amd therefore more an organisation will hire more employees. Parkinson determined from his analysis that a typical company had a staff increase per year to be around 5-7% completely unrelated to the amount of work in the organisation. The fact that there is no linear relationship between amount of staff and amount of people depicts Parkinson's law. Based on this, he formulated a mathematical formula to determine the annual increase in staff in any public administrative department.

Example

Whether it’s an engineering project, a essay due in the english class, or a work exercise in your everyday job, how long it will take you to do it depends on how much time you have for it. Imagine an elderly woman who wakes up and decides to send her grandson who lives in the capital a postcard today. Before anything she has to get breakfast because of her daily routines. After that she spends half an hour trying to remember where the old postcards are hidden. An hour is spend on waking up her husband to ask him to fetch it in the back of the messy storage room. There is none to her liking, so she decides to go and buy a new one in the corner store which open up in another hour. After a successful trip to the corner store, she will spend another half an hour in search for the adress before the composition will be made. Twenty minutes is now spending on deciding wether or not she has to bring an umbrella for dispatching the post card in the pillar box next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil .

Imagine that a team Parkinson describes how work is elastic in its demands on time.

Work has a tendency to become increasingly more complex as to fill the time alotted when poeple are involved. Procrastination plays a big role in Parkinson's law. Knowing that a project or and undertaking has a deadline often inspires us to leave work to right before that deadline – and our delays in getting started mean the time required for that task expands.

Parkinson uses the example of how the bureaucracy of the British Civil Service grew unrelated to the amount of work. The growth depended on two factors: The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates and The Law of Multiplication of Work. He formulated a mathematical formula to determine the increase in staff in any public administrative departmment. Parkinson's Law explains the behavioural aspect of scheduling. If more time is available to complete a task, the task will most likely take up all the time. This results in inefficient use of time and effort. Project managers can use this to understand employees motivation for completing tasks. In project schedule management, this is valuable knowledge when estimating activity duration. The project manager should account for this tendency when scheduling a project and to ensure efficient use of time. To account for Parkinson's Law, a project manager needs to set deadlines. Deadlines ensure that a task only takes up the necessary time for completion while requiring the most effort.

Formula

$x=\frac{2k^m+L}{n}$

• x – number of new employees to be hired annually
• k – number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
• m – number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
• L – difference: age at hiring − age at retirement
• n – number of administrative files actually completed

References

https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/what-is-parkinsons-law#:~:text=Parkinson%27s%20Law%20is%20the%20old,for%20the%20Economist%20in%201955.