FEATURED PAPER

Parkinson’s Law, Overtime Work and Human Productivity
(Impact of the Planned Time of Work on Human Productivity)

By Pavel Barseghyan, PhD

Abstract

Contemporary approach to the modeling of human work process considers people’s productivity as something constant, inherent to the individuals and human groups.  This leads to the inadequate project cycle time models and scheduling risk models.  Especially there are serious unresolved problems with the work completion time variations.  Existing risk models produce unrealistic high values for the standard deviation of the project completion time.

In reality the human work productivity is not a constant.  It is highly variable and, which is more important, it is highly controllable.  Indeed people differ by potential maximum productivities which can be considered as nearly constant values. But those constant maximum productivity values have nothing to do with the everyday working productivities of individuals.

Developer’s hourly productivity can be much lower than his maximum possible productivity number. At the same time his or her daily productivity can be higher than his or her daily maximum productivity number because of the extra working hours or overtime work.

Analysis of the people’s work process shows that the planned time of work has a significant impact on their productivity. This happens because people in the process of work are dynamically controlling their own capacities and abilities, always taking into account for the remaining time to completion and the remaining volume of work.

In this sense, the people’s process of work is always located in between the following two extreme regimes. If the allotted time is longer than is needed for the normal completion of work, the whole process takes place in accordance with the Parkinson's Law. If that time is unreasonably short, it leads to the need for overtime work… 

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About the Author Pavel Barseghyan, PhD Author Dr. Pavel Barseghyan is Vice President of Research for Numetrics Management Systems, has over 40 years experience in academia, the electronics industry, the EDA industry and Project Management Research. Also he is the founder of Systemic PM, LLC, a project management company. Prior to joining Numetrics, Dr. Barseghyan worked as an R&D manager at Infinite Technology Corp. in Texas. He was also a founder and the president of an EDA start-up company, DAN Technologies, Ltd. that focused on high-level chip design planning and RTL structural floor planning technologies. Before joining ITC, Dr. Barseghyan was head of the Electronic Design and CAD department at the State Engineering University of Armenia, focusing on development of the Theory of Massively Interconnected Systems and its applications to electronic design. During the period of 1975-1990, he was also a member of the University Educational Policy Commission for Electronic Design and CAD Direction in the Higher Education Ministry of the former USSR. Earlier in his career he was a senior researcher in Yerevan Research and Development Institute of Mathematical Machines (Armenia). He is an author of nine monographs and textbooks and more than 100 scientific articles in the area of electronic design and EDA methodologies, and tools development. More than 10 Ph.D. degrees have been awarded under his supervision. Dr. Barseghyan holds an MS in Electrical Engineering (1967) and Ph.D. (1972) and Doctor of Technical Sciences (1990) in Computer Engineering from Yerevan Polytechnic Institute (Armenia).  Pavel can be contacted at pavel@systemicpm.com.