Parkinson's Law Research Articles

Estudio exploratorio en gestión de proyectos

Several authors argue that project management is conducted with quantitative techniques that correspond to a linear cause-effect behavior; however, it should be treated with techniques that correspond to a nonlinear cause and effect behavior. This study explores the behavior of project management under a non-linear cause-effect approach using chaos theory and four project management variables: time, human resources, quality, and cost. Parkinson's law and chaos theory are used; mathematical equations are formulated to explain nonlinear cause-effect behavior in project management. The study was conducted considering the experience of management in mining projects. The mathematical model found can be used by academics to deepen the analysis of the reasons for the complexity of project management. Also, this study is useful for managers in making decisions to calculate the expected duration of the project.

Agile words [Technically Speaking

In his 1957 book Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration, the naval historian and author C. Northcote Parkinson writes of a fictional committee meeting during which, after a two-and-a-halfminute nondiscussion on whether to build a nuclear reactor worth US $10 million, the members spend 45 minutes discussing the power plant's bike shed, worth $2,350. From this he coined Parkinson's Law of Triviality: Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. Using Parkinson's example, the programmer Poul-Henning Kamp popularized the term bikeshedding: frequent, detailed discussions on a minor issue conducted while major issues are being ignored or postponed. The functional opposite of bikeshedding is trystorming, which refers to rapidly and repeatedly prototyping or implementing new products and processes. In a bikeshedding culture, ideas get only a short discussion before being put off for further study. In a trystorming culture, that same idea would be immediately prototyped, modeled, simulated, mocked up, or implemented, and examined to see what works and what doesn't. The trystorming motto is Fail early, fail fast, fail often.

Parkinson's Law: Will GP workloads ease?

The government has committed itself to finding an extra 5,000 GPs over the next four years in the hope that an injection of extra manpower (or womanpower) will do the trick. But will that be enough?

Сравнительный анализ кадрового состава государственных служащих республики Калмыкия и Волгоградской области

Comparative analysis of public employees’ staff structure in the Republic of Kalmykia and Volgograd region is presented in this article. The correlation lack between the quantitative and qualitative structure of public employees’ staff and effi ciency of their activity is revealed. Author’s research is based on the broad attraction of relevant statistical data obtained in foreign countries, Russia and its regions. The main trends, such as self-increasing of public employees’ number (according to Parkinson's law), gender asymmetry in professional structure, cyclic nature of public employees’ number change are allocated.

Threat and Anxiety in US Foreign Policy

Four decades ago, Karl Deutsch devised what he called ‘Parkinson's Law for national security’: A nation's feeling of insecurity expands directly with its power. This certainly seems to apply to the United States, which is simultaneously the strongest country in the history of the world and the most insecure of today's great powers. The threats it has recently identified in the international system, from Iraq to Hugo Chávez to terrorism, are minor compared to what most states have had to confront throughout history. As states grow in power they usually also become more materially secure; why, then, do they often seem to worry more, often about trivial matters? This essay explores the political psychology of unipolarity. Pathologies arise when irrational forces drive policymaking; presumably better policy results from more rational cost-benefit analyses.

What single change to your working life will restore your faith in medicine as a profession – and why?

What single change to your working life will restore your faith in medicine as a profession – and why?

Service Quality in Modern Bureaucracy: Parkinson's Theory at Work

SUMMARYParkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of administrators in an office is bound to increase over time. A unique laboratory to test Parkinson's ideas are vehicle registration offices in Germany. Using their data we found empirical support for Parkinson's Law: First, service quality is no better in offices that have more staff per case. Second, service quality is worse if the service procedure is disaggregated into multiple smaller sub‐services. Third, the staff size is a convex function of the number of customers. These results are robust to specifications in various alternative models.

Parkinson's law revisited

How to curb red tape, what's the maximum number of people to involve in making a decision, and why you should never, ever form a committee of eight – one man had all the answers 50 years ago

Battling Parkinson's Law

It's hard to imagine that Sonny Curtis knew about Parkinson's Law when he wrote the song “I Fought the Law.” The song has achieved a place in rock history at the hands of The Clash, but the law has received comparatively less play in our collective consciousness. I would have never become

Human Factors Contributes to Queuing Theory: Parkinson's Law and Security Screening

It is the thesis of this paper that queuing theory should take into account not just the behavior of customers in queues, but also the behavior of servers. Servers may change their behavior in response to queue length, which has implications for service quality as well as for customer waiting time. Parkinson's Law would be one explanation of any speed-up effect as queue length increases. We provide empirical evidence for this assertion in one queuing situation with high visibility and high error consequence: security screening at an airport.

Server Adaptation in an Airport Security System Queue

We study the airport security queuing system for server behavior in response to queue length, and postulate its implications on security. To achieve this objective, an observational study was performed at the security screening process of a US airport. It was found that X-ray screeners (servers) did speed up with queue length for one type of item, laptop computers. Significant correlations between queue length and service time suggested Parkinson's Law as an explanation. Correlation of this finding with available data on speed-accuracy tradeoffs allows us to reach the following conclusion: For airports where laptops computers are carried by a significant number of passengers as carry-on items, our study indicates a likely impact on server performance as measured as by probability of threat detection.

Meeting spin with spin

There is a new breed of trades union press journalists - and they are fast breeders, writes Routledge. Union membership has more than halved, to 6.5 million, since the mid-1970s, yet there are dozens of media officers in the labour movement, and a clutch of ex-union PRs are in the House of Commons, some of them in senior ministerial positions. "By the same token," writes Routledge, "the number of journalists specialising in industrial affairs has diminished almost to vanishing point, yet the number of full-time spin-doctors seeking to bend their ear has sharply increased. Some kind of inverse Parkinson's Law is at work, requiring the number of press officers to rise in direct proportion to the decline in trade union activity. What is going on?"

Selling Women on PDAs from “Simply Palm” to “Audrey”: How Moore's Law Met Parkinson's Law in the Kitchen

This essay investigates key moments in the history of personal digital assistant (PDA) marketing to women. Analyzing promotional texts for three PDAs that received considerable press coverage from 1999 to 2001, this essay explores the cultural significance of the convergence of anxieties about women's place in the gendered division of labor with the computer industry's changing marketing imperatives. Drawing on an array of promotional texts, including news articles, press releases, promotional Web sites, and ads appearing in newspapers and magazines, this paper tells the story of how the computer industry aimed to sell smaller, faster computing devices to women while promising to mediate and thus reproduce women's overwork as paid and familial laborers. After experimenting with the PDA as a sexy fashionable gadget for working women, marketers approached women as mothers with “Audrey,” an Internet appliance designed for the kitchen.

Parkinson's Law and the New Public Management? Contracting Determinants and Service‐Quality Consequences in Public Education

Why is contracting used more frequently under some circumstances than others? What is its impact on spending for core mission and on service quality? These questions are explored with data from more than 1,000 Texas school districts. The evidence for a recent three‐year period shows that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts' central task and is not positively associated with district performance. Why, then, do districts contract? While several variables are associated with the degree of contracting, the most interesting is the relative size of a district's bureaucratic staff. Furthermore, the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal: Each is associated with subsequent growth in the other. The dynamic suggests an updated version of Parkinson's law. These findings indicate the need for researchers to probe the causes and consequences of contracting more thoroughly to help public managers assess this important option.

Edge of chaos

With regard to the article on chaos in the National Health Service1, I was particularly interested in the conclusion about increasing resources. This, if I read correctly, is a very good corollary of Parkinson's Law; that is, the amount of work to be done increases in order to fill the time (resources?; personnel?) available to do it.

Timeless demonstrations of Parkinson's first law.

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion," Parkinson's law, is an explanation classic that has survived without an artifact-free demonstration at the individual level. To evaluate Parkinson's law, undergraduate subjects expected to judge four sets of photos of faces with reference to a subjective criterion. The experimental subjects, who were told that the fourth set was canceled before they began work on the third set, dallied on the third set; that is, as compared with controls, they prolonged work. The cancellation-dalliance effect was reobtained in two exact replications. It was obtained again in a fourth study, a conceptual replication wherein subjects processed negatively toned phrases against an objective criterion. The generalizability of the effect and explanations for it are discussed.

The effect of available capacity on jail incarceration: An empirical test of Parkinson's law

The strong positive association between available capacity and incarceration rates has been interpreted by social scientists as consistent with one of two competing hypotheses: (1) that available capacity affects rates of incarceration or (2) that capacity levels respond to variations in confinement populations. Although these two alternative hypotheses imply different causal mechanisms, it has been difficult to adjudicate between them, in part because of the data and methodologies employed in prior research. This study investigates whether a large increase in jail capacity in Orange County, Florida increased daily jail incarceration levels above that expected on the basis of preexisting incarceration trends and police activity. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that available capacity influences incarceration levels. The number of daily arrests made by police, however, is of little consequence in predicting levels of jail incarceration. Taken in total, these findings suggest that adding additional capacity may act to accelerate the growth of confinement populations.

What are PERT Estimates?

This paper questions what network parameter-estimates really are. This follows recent papers on Parkinson's law, on the relationship with Management by Objectives, and on the historical basis on which these estimates are made. An underlying distribution is proposed that follows from these points—both a general shape and a pragmatic approximation—which can be shown to reflect behaviour found in practice, and has indeed been used in practical risk analysis.

What are PERT Estimates?

This paper questions what network parameter-estimates really are. This follows recent papers on Parkinson's law, on the relationship with Management by Objectives, and on the historical basis on which these estimates are made. An underlying distribution is proposed that follows from these points—both a general shape and a pragmatic approximation—which can be shown to reflect behaviour found in practice, and has indeed been used in practical risk analysis.

What are PERT Estimates?

This paper questions what network parameter-estimates really are. This follows recent papers on Parkinson's law, on the relationship with Management by Objectives, and on the historical basis on which these estimates are made. An underlying distribution is proposed that follows from these points—both a general shape and a pragmatic approximation—which can be shown to reflect behaviour found in practice, and has indeed been used in practical risk analysis.