Improvement Insights Blog

Parkinson’s law says: work expands to fill the time available. What are consequences of this?

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“You’ve probably heard of Parkinson’s Law. For some reason, I decided to go get Parkinson’s book out of our local library (from 1957; I was 6 years old at the time). Parkinson’s Law says ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’

“I don’t know about you, but sometimes in college, I would wait till the last day to actually do that paper that was due, but I knew about it for 3 weeks to a month or something [ahead of time], right? It expands to fill the available time, or you wait ‘til the last minute to get it done, and then it’s messy and probably not as good as it could have been. I learned a lot about that. So now when I’m coding, I start coding early. By the time I get to the release point, I’ve got everything pretty much figured out.

“But he has a curious comment in here. He says, “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals.” Think about it: Most managers want to grow their staff and take on more ‘whatevers,’ right? But sometimes they’re filling up available time. It takes more people to get the same thing done in the same amount of time. So this is a messy way to go about it. and you’re adding complexity to the business when you do that.

“He also said that “Officials want to make work for each other.” So this manager wants to make work for that manager so they look kind of silly or something. You know, very often we find one department’s producing one thing and the other department has to fix it when it comes out because it’s not what they were looking for, right? ([These are] internal customers.)

“One of the things I have found is as you continue to add this complexity, and make everything slower and sluggish and more error-prone, at some point someone is going to get wise. They may bring on a new leadership team. That new leadership team may just take a chainsaw to how you’re doing everything and cut your staff and just throw everything into disarray. Productivity plunges and morale plunges, and guess what? If you are not systematically simplifying, streamlining and optimizing how you do business, someone may come in and explain it to you and it’s not going to be pleasant. I think this is true in healthcare and many other places; if we’re not systematically doing this all the time (simplifying, streamlining, optimizing), someone will come explain it to us and it will not be pretty and you may be unemployed.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Continue to simplify, streamline, optimize all the time so that you don’t become the target for this kind of behavior. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”