Peter JoranIT Infrastructure Manager| Whitney Bradley & BrownReston, Va, United States
I'm looking for the named 'Law' of time, similar in nature as 'Moore's Law' in the computing realm. Moor's simply stated "The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18 months."
The time law I'm looking for has to do with duration and will be something like 'if an activity could be completed in one week but you gave it three weeks than the activity will take all three weeks.
Many Thanks!!
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Graham RudkinDirector of PM/PMO| Hi-Gram Management Services LtdHull, East Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Parkinson's Law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Parkinson's Law of Triviality.
Parkinson's Law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:[1][2]
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
It was later reprinted together with other essays in the book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958). He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.
The current form of the law is not that which Parkinson refers to by that name in the article. Rather, he assigns to the term a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time. Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting his law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while Great Britain's overseas empire declined (indeed, he shows that the Colonial Office had its greatest number of staff at the point when it was folded into the Foreign Office because of a lack of colonies to administer). He explains this growth by two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done."
In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that "'Parkinson's Law works everywhere."[3]
[edit] Corollaries
In time, however, the first-referenced meaning of the phrase has dominated, and sprouted several corollaries: for example, the derivative relating to computers:
Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
In terms of computer executable code filling CPU resource (see software bloat), a similar law is Wirth's law.
A second aphorism, attributed to Parkinson and sometimes called "Parkinson's second law", is "expenditures rise to meet income".
A modern version is that no amount of computer automation will reduce the size of a bureaucracy.[4]
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Jerry MulenburgRetired| Mulenburg-QuixoteFairfield, Ca, United States
Take a look at Critical Chain project management by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. The 'unstated law of time' in Critical Chain is that ,if you take half the estimated time away from each task and put the time taken away into 'time buffers' that can be accessed when needed (you bank the time), most tasks will be completed within the estimated time, or earlier. Just using the estimated time almost gurantees that tasks will take at least the estimated time, and usually longer. Saving Changes...
Elyse NielsenSenior Project Manager| Ascension Health Information ServicesHaines City, Fl, United States
Hi Peter,
Let's call it the Perfectionist Principle!
Perfectionist Principle - Work Effort expands to consume all available time including the contingency and buffer in order to deliver the perfect outcome.
