Parkinson's Law vs. Project Management Blogpost Cover

Parkinson’s Law vs. Project Management

Parkinson’s Law is the bane of project scheduling.  In simple terms, the law is explained thusly:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

That is, if you allot 2 weeks to perform a task, the task’s complexity will increase to fill those 2 weeks.

In software development this promotes bloat or haplessly trying to build the “perfect product” before your arbitrary launch date (a date that nobody except you cares about). Continuous Deployment is one way of avoiding the effects of Parkinson’s Law.

Another is to just not schedule things or not set arbitrary future milestones.  Another would be to not make software and to just sell coconuts on the beach instead.

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