Parkinson's Law in Project Management

Parkinson's Law is the propensity that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion ... by C. Northcote Parkinson in an essay 1955

"commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced.

People working and amount of work is not related to each other

The importance of Parkinson’s Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled.