Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time allocated for it. For instance, if you have a project due in two-weeks it will take you the entire two weeks. But, if that same project is scheduled for two-days, you could still finish it in two days. This was a theory I noticed in high school (before I knew it was published, I thought I was coming up with something original).
A lot of management articles that I’ve read speak about motivation being killed when unreasonable deadlines being committed, faulty software due to pressured deadlines, and lack of quality. Am I missing something or is this just wrong?
Personally when I’ve got too much to do, I turn out the best results. Sure, the quality may be lower but the amount of work I get done is worth the lowered quality. I get more done and ignore the small detail work. Their argument is that when deadlines are enforced, quality is lowered, the product is criticized, and it creates an unhealthy work enviornment. This causes unhappy workers and destruction within the company. My question is how do you react to an extreme amount of responsibility?
I think its the extra little polish that makes the clients go … WOW. So in that respect, the quality of the work is very important.
At work, our philosopy is to have a bunch of small time-frame releases instead of one or two long time-frame releases. This seems to help alleviate the problems with having long-term projects while allowing time for the quality work to show up (in the last few small releases).
So, if you have a 2 week project, make the main functionality as 2 day release. Then when thats done, start another release that adds more functionality or quality to the project. Rinse and repeat.