2007-11-02

Parkinson's law and quality

While I do find the Pareto Principle a very helpful rule I see the Parkinson's Law with criticism - here is why:

The Parkinson's Law states:
work expands to fill the time available
This is for managers a good reason to give less time to workers to achieve the company's goals. In my opinion (and fortunately not only in my opinion) this rule can be very counter-productive.

This rule applies only if you really overestimate a project and therefore give a far too big budget to the project. Then people might think that they want to get also something from the money you have too much to give away. And further - usually projects are underestimated in the required time/people/money budget and not overestimated.

In all other cases reducing the time/people/money budget for something simply means reducing the output quality accordingly!

On the other hand if you give slightly more budget than necessary then people could improve quality and/or service for (additional) benefit for the customer. Further - remaining time is a possibility to review and learn additional lessons.

The only remaining argument for the Parkinson's Law is people's procrastination tendency. But I do think that simply reducing the available budget is not a solution for the procrastination problem.

Related post: Urging to forge at full speed, Productivity limits, Minimum effort.

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