Recipe for Engineering Teams to defeat Parkinson’s law

You know you have one week to prepare the presentation, you are on track to finish it in a week. Now there is a change of schedule and you got another week. When do you finish the presentation? Right, one night before the actual event.

Once again you are developing a feature and target to finish it by Friday. On Tuesday you realized that the scope of work was cut in half. When do you finish your feature? Of course, on Friday.

In 1955, Dr. Cyril Northcote Parkinson articulated this behavior as Parkinson’s law. It states that “Work expands as to fill the time available for its completion”

Further research[1] showed that work does not surely fill all the time, but it does expand based on available time. This particular research paper[1] states that Subjects tend to spend more time on the actual task when allowed access time. So, we don’t necessarily slack or procrastinate but we over-engineer or overcomplicate the task when we have more time. Terms like Code cleanup, Refactoring, or performance improvement might come to your mind now.

Does it mean we should set aggressive deadlines for all our projects? Not really, but still you can use the Parkinson’s law in your favor by setting reasonable deadlines. Here are some things that worked for my team

• Reasonable timelines: Make sure the team sets reasonable timelines and be flexible to change when you get new information.
• Clear definition of DONE: Most of the time definition of Done is not very intuitive. Define and publish a clear definition of Done.
• Accountability through team check-ins: Regular team sync-ups help the team stay accountable to the commitments.
• Regular product Demos: Regular end-to-end demos help the team to see the big picture, celebrate progress, and get in a mindset to deliver a finished product.
• Provide clarity on what’ Next: We tend to overindulge in things when we are not clear what to pick next.

What has worked for your Team?

[1] Elliot Aronson, David Landy, Further steps beyond Parkinson’s Law: A replication and extension of the excess time effect, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(67)90029-7