Parkinson’s Law
As almost a counter-example to Hofstadter’s law, Parkinson’s law describes the inflation of a project’s scope to meet the time available for deadline.
Example applications
This law is probably, again, familiar to you as a student - if you are given three weeks to write an essay, it will take you three weeks; if you are given three hours, it will take you three hours. Cyril Northcote Parkinson famously observed this phenomena in relation to the British civil service, where the size of the bureaucracy continued to increase, and so did the scope of their duties (not the other way around).
Steps
Acknowledging Parkinson’s law, again, doesn’t necessarily help you to keep the project in check. In trying to examine Parkinson’s law, you might find information about the timings of a project’s planned and actual deliverables, or look for the growth of the workforce in a bureaucracy.
Key concepts
- an overview of Parkinson’s law
- an example application of a project where the project scope has expanded, or the size of the workforce has increased without any perceivable gain
- advice for the student engineer about avoiding scope creep through referencing Parkinson’s law
Core resources
- The Economist, Parkinson’s Law [online]
Similar concept…
A similar concept to Parkinson’s law is the idea of “shifting goalposts” or “scope creep”, where the project shifts from its original intention and expands to fill the time before delivery.