Parkinson's Law: achieving more in less time

Unrealistic schedule is the 3rd most relevant reason behind project failure. Poor capability of activities time-length forecasting is not the only cause, its origin often lies in a less evident time management concept: Parkinson’s Law.

Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, its law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Basically, it expresses the concept that there is a proper amount of time to devote for a task completion, depending on the task and the availability of resources, and assigning more time than that is not going to increase the quality of the outcome.

This concept, contextualised in the project management practice, has a relevant impact on the project schedule management, more precisely on the “Estimate Activity Durations” phase where the motivation of staff is an important factor to take into consideration but also impossible to quantify and difficult to manage.

In this article, several strategies to counteract its effect are briefly presented, along with two practical approaches derived from different perspectives:

- a modelling framework for project management activities that expects workers to behave influenced by Parkinson’s law. It ultimately adopts a stochastic activity completion time;

- incentive schemes, applicable to projects designed under either Critical Path Method (CPM) or Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), that reward task completion.

Finally, the limitations of the above strategies are described, with regard to situations where they cannot be applied or it is not productive trying to minimise Parkinson’s Law implications.

Big idea

Parkinson’s Law consists in the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It describes a key concept which should not be ignored by any project management while managing complexity. Its approach is purely psychological and can lead to put in action important strategies for a superior time management, increasing both efficiency and effectiveness as well as enhancing time use.

In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson articulated the saying with the aim of satirically highlighting the inefficiency of public administration and civil service bureaucracy in the United Kingdom. He noticed that despite a decrease of fleet size by two thirds and of personnel by a third, during that period the number of bureaucrats rose by almost 6% a year