Parkinson's Law: achieving more in less time

Author: Gian Marco Grieco

Abstract

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.

Psychological boundary to productivity

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 . In his book “Parkinson Law: The Pursuit of Progress” he also stated a correlation between the size of bodies and their efficiency, providing with evident proofs of institutions, in the English history, which lost power as they grew .

The resonance of this law comes from its universal application. As well as in bureaucracy, it finds applications in everyday life. The concept can be basically rephrased as “people tend to be less efficient in carrying out a task when the time constraint is not well perceived” and perceived, instead of defined, is a key word of this statement because it means to also include in the scope all of these situations where people have too much time compared to the task length, so that their perception is as not having a deadline at all.

Why to have a clear deadline is that important? Because it gets you stressed. Although that does not sound like a benefit, actually it is. As stated in “The Yerkes-Dodson Law” the best performance is reached when the right level of mental arousal is experienced. A strong anxiety would impair performance as much as when people are too relaxed .

Consequently, when no urgency of working on the task is perceived, people put in place many inefficient behaviours. Given the fact that they perceive having plenty of time, unimportant details gain more attention than needed, longer or more frequent breaks are taken and many more other actions that make them use more time than required. Another tendency is to procrastinate, that means waiting for the last moment we think possible to start to have all the work done before the deadline, without considering unexpected events might occur however. In particular, procrastination is supported by social loafing while working in a team; members feel even less pressure since each of them is sharing the responsibility with the others.

Parkinson's Law in Project Management

Exactly the same conducts take place among members of a team that is working on a project. Considering and preventing them from happening as much as possible is fundamental for the project success. Unrealistic schedules are likely to cause project failures, they were the 3rd most common cause according to PMI’s Pulse of Profession 2007 Global Project Management survey .

There might be many reasons behind an inaccurate schedule, in relation to Parkinson’s Law the essential process to consider is “Estimate Activity Durations”. This is basically the process of estimating the amount of time and resources required by each activity to be concluded; as the others, it needs to receive information as input, which are used by tools and techniques in order to provide the desired estimate as outcome . Activities’ duration and allocated resources mutually determine each other and the scarcer eventually influences the other. From one perspective, few available resources imply a long completion time and on the other hand, completing an activity in a short time demands more resources in terms of quantity and quality. Project managers usually focus on the resources-side, since factors involved are more manageable.

In particular, one factor, that affects duration estimate, is staff motivation. It is difficult to measure, so to control, and its perception heavily depends on skills of team manager, furthermore there are no standard techniques to achieve high motivation, on the contrary the strategy used needs to fit with team members’ personalities. As described above, low motivation leads to less effective behaviours, lower performances and compromises duration estimate of activities. Foreseeing impacts of Parkinson’s Law prevents unexpected longer task durations during execution stage of the process, which would involve in addition higher costs as the detection occurs at a later stage.

Counteractive strategies and PM tools

During the years, many tools and approaches have been proposed to counteract Parkinson’s Law impact on productivity: after briefly presenting the main strategies to avoid its effects, two practical approaches based on two different perspectives are described and evaluated.

There are several ways of ensuring great time management, that are effective in project management as well as self-management. These strategies could be divided into two groups with slightly different targets: help allocating the right amount of time to each task and stimulate mental arousal. However, it is not always easy to state which group a strategy belongs to, since most of them might serve both purposes in most situations.

Regarding the first set, task prioritisation suggests somehow the order of tasks execution, so that most important tasks in terms of time or urgency are likely handled at the beginning of the working day when more time is available and mind is refreshed.

Moreover, time blocking is a technique that consists in dividing a period of time, typically a day or a week, into time blocks assigned to specific tasks. That is useful for planning efficiently daily work. Since it is a kind of scheduling, its effectiveness relies heavily on the estimate quality of time required by each task.

Setting hard deadlines leads to higher level of performance and, of course, saving time . As described in many studies this strategy does not affect the quality of work, except for drastic application of this concept and provided that more frequent supervision is required to avoid growth of employee turnover .

Adopting a different perspective from limiting time, reward systems could be also used to stimulate employees to finish tasks before or within deadlines. Human beings are reward oriented creatures and bounties for every completed activity or subtask help to stay focused.

In the following part of this section, two project management tools, that take into consideration Parkinson’s Law and its effects, are presented. They rely on some of the concepts previously explained and are based on two counterposed ways of solving the problem, so that two different approaches to this issue are discussed.

Stochastical Critical Path Model

The first method proposed by Gutierrez and Kouvelis (1991) can be described as a “Stochastic Critical Path Model”, CPM or PERT are the most known critical path models concerning project management . The former operates with deterministic activity completion times and identifying the “critical path”, that is a sequence of activities which delays the project due date if only one of them is late, it draws attention on the most important activities. While the latter basically works in the same way but adopting probabilistic times normally distributed.

However, both ignore worker behavioural issues and fail to model their implications on activity durations. The proposed method extends PERT model embedding a different time calculation in its probabilistic approach, according to Parkinson’s Law. Firstly, it considers activity completion times as a function of the allocated time d and also introduces “work expansion” term in the calculation, a new factor representing leisure time or unnecessary time expansion. As well as completion time, work expansion is a function of the allocated time and is higher than zero. To provide a simple formulation example of this method, it is considered an activity that can be divided into two subtasks 1 and 2 which respectively require time T1 and T2 to be completed. Then the completion of the activity, taking into account allocated time and work expansion term, is:

$(1) T(d)=T_1+T_2+w(d)$

In particular, whenever a task is completed a worker can decide to expand completion time. The term w is defined as the difference between the available time left before the deadline and the expected time needed. For instance, after completion of subtask 1, then w is:

$(2) w(d)=d-T_1-ET_2$

Where d is subtask 2 due date, ET2 is the perceived completion time of task 2. If the available time is larger than the remaining time for completing the activity, the worker expands the work by an amount of time equal to their difference.

From (1) and (2), the expected completion of the activity is derived:

$(3) ET(d)=ET_1+ET_2+Ew(d)$

Furthermore, this method models three kinds of worker corresponding to three different behaviour patterns in relation to work expansion:

• “regular worker”, correspondent to the pattern just described;
• “busy worker”, who postpones the start of activity until there is barely enough time to complete it, but once started he won’t expand;
• “moderate worker” pattern, that is basically a middle way between the previous.

These behavioural profiles are insightful because provide another fundamental of Parkinson’s Law. The expected completion time taken by the busy worker is going to be:

$(4) ET'(d)=max(d; ET_1+ET_2)$

Comparing the regular and busy worker profiles, the following inequality is deduced:

$(5) ET(d)>ET'(d)$

Following that, keeping workers reasonably busy, the overall productivity is improved.

To sum up, this method presents a mathematical attempt to formulate Parkinson’s Law that can be a base to build on actual scheduling techniques which consider Parkinson’s Law implications while estimating activity durations.

Incentive schemes

On the contrary, the second method is designed by Chen and Hall (2021) to counteract Parkinson’s Law, instead of just taking into consideration its effects during the scheduling process . In particular they aim for mitigating its pitfall consisting in asymmetry that longer task completion times are likely to result in later delivery of the projects, whereas shorter completion times fail to anticipate project end date. Their approach establishes incentive schemes in order to exploit the potential benefits coming from earlier task completion.

This method motivates employees to complete their task at the earliest, these schemes address two behavioural issues: effort level and procrastination. Under the influence of Parkinson’s Law, two scenarios are possible when is assigned more time than needed to activities: either employees work slower in the first days and then complete the task at the deadline or they delay the start of the task until the latest time according to expected duration.

Finally, the proposed incentive schemes are easily implementable and flexible to be fit for different organisational structures of performance incentives.

Final reflections

Even though the two methods address Parkinson’s Law implications from different perspectives, they are not mutually exclusive and can be actually embedded together in project management practices improving scheduling reliability even more than if applied individually.

As far as Parkinson's Law impact can be reduced to its minimum, there is no chance of totally eliminating it from working routine. Since Parkinson's Law describes an intrinsic trait of human psychology, contrasting techniques might not be completely effective. Then project managers should necessarily consider a longer activity duration than the theoretical, yet keeping employees in the dark about that.

Annotated bibliography

The following list provides some key references the reader might find interesting as further readings about the topic:

Bo Chen, Nicholas G. Hall, (2020) Incentive schemes for resolving Parkinson’s Law in project management. European Journal of Operational Research 288 (2021) 666-681

This scientific article provides a flexible basis from which various practical schemes can be designed to implement incentive schemes in organisations. This article is innovative in the meaning that addresses an issue which has never been handled before: the possibility that a project worker with multiple dependent tasks can improve their incentive payment by falsely reporting some of their completion times.

Genaro J. Gutierrez, Panagiotis Kouvelis, (1991) Parkinson's Law and Its Implications for Project Management. Management Science 37(8):990-1001.

The content of this article has been only partially presented above for the sake of scope consistency. A thorough conceptual and mathematical explanation of a project management model comparable to CPM or PERT is provided. That model handle Parkinson's Law implications through utilisation of stochastic activity completion time in project scheduling.