Boss pathologies--Trying to beat Parkinson's Law
Prof. Cyril Parkinson, in his book “Parkinson’s Law" states that the amount of work done on a task will always expand to fill the time allocated to complete it. This law feels right to managers--they seldom see a task finished ahead of schedule. Even an on-time completion for a farily routine task is rare enough that we usually celebrate it! A clear implication of the law is that employees, either through poor judgment or sloth, do more than is necessary or laze around enough to ensure that a project is never completed ahead of schedule. Managers try to beat Parkinson’s law by allocating less time for tasks—their logic being that this will reduce the amount of “expanded” work. This process generates tons of Reality Distortion Field (RDF). The big problem for the manager is figuring out how much time the task should take. Obviously if the manager allocates zero time for the task there will be no “expanded” work—however it will be hard to convince anyone this is a reasonable plan. As a result managers are forced to compromise. With the goal of minimizing “expanded work” they set the schedule to the shortest time interval that no one can prove is impossible—the Everything Always Goes Right (EAGR) schedule. The EAGR schedule creates problems—lots of them. These problems impact at least four different groups of people within the organization: the workers themselves, the task planners (either senior level workers or lower level managers, the manager that sets the schedule, and the managers of the groups that are dependent on the completed task. The workers assigned to the task with an EAGR schedule experience a sense of foreboding that their lives are about to be disrupted yet again with demands for long hours, skipped vacations, and exhortations to work smarter and harder. Has management yet again lost its mind—how can anyone believe that the task can be done that quickly? The task planners try to figure out how to create a workable plan. They struggle with with the expectation that evaluating any approach, however efficient and productive, that is not consistent with the existing EAGR schedule cannot be considered. It would be like planning for failure. In reality, very few EAGR schedules are achieved, and by not considering valuable approaches the planners may ironically cause the task to take even longer than is necessary. This situation is addressed by Harwood’s rule number one “Don’t do dumb things because of unrealistic schedules.” Granted, there will be cases that necessity will birth some innovative approach that achieves the EAGR –but these are rare.
posted by VanceH- @ 12:47 AM
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