Productivity and deadlines
Day 271 / 365
There is famous law in project management known as Parkinson’s law. It goes something like this —
work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
What this means is that if you take a 1-Day job and give your workers a week to finish it, they will somehow find a way to stretch the job to a week. Whether this law is true or not is a different story, but most managers believe in this. This is why they come up with all these phony deadlines.
Managers would make up tight deadlines on purpose to make their employees work fast. But now it often backfires, as the employees will presume any deadline to be a false one. Is it really helping to get stuff done faster?
The biggest question that I have is who should be the one deciding the deadlines? Surely it should be the employees themselves. But it’s always the manager who decides the deadline and everyone just has to make it happen. Often the quality is compromised.
There was a study done where the productivity of workers was measured on projects in which they themselves decided the deadline vs. when their managers decided it. On a scale of 1 to 100, the productivity score when the workers were in charge of the timelines was 80, and for the other, it was 64. Clearly the people worked better when they got to decide the timelines.
What’s even more fascinating is the case when there were no timelines. In that case, the productivity score was 92!
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — The endless state of no flow