Law of Parkinson

See also: Parkinson

The law of Parkinson affirms that “work is spread out in order to occupy the serviceable time for its completion”.

It was expressed in 1958 by C. Northcote Parkinson in his book the Laws of Parkinson , based on an long experience in the British administration. The scientific observations which contributed to the development of the law took account of the increase in the number of employees at the Office of the colonial businesses, this in spite of the decline of the British Empire in same time.

According to Parkinson, that is due to two forces:

“a civil servant intends to multiply his subordinates, not its rivals”: he has natural tendency has to recruit somebody of more qualified than him at least in a field, but also to divide work to avoid being called into question by one of his collaborators. He thus creates needs for internal coordination, which create an additional workload, involving the recruiting of additional collaborators. One thus builds an “autarkical” system which will consume, in an endogenous way, an increasing share of the supplied energy, leading to the second law:
“the civils servant create for themselves work mutually”. Any administrative task indeed has tendency has to occupy all the time which is allocated to him.

It foot-note also that the total of the employees of a administration increased by 5 to 7% “independently of any variation of the quantity of work to achieve per annum (if necessary)”. It could indeed note the reduction in the number of boats, indicators of the workload of the administration concerned, was concomitant of an increase in the number of people working in the administration. It thus highlighted a fundamental disease of the administrative bureaucracies.

This “bureaucratic cancer” does not develop that if there is deficiency of management. Indeed, to cure it, the only solution, as as regards cancer, it is ablation. It is thus necessary that a manager (tallies) decides this amputation, decides to remove the tasks which were created. One in the manners of carrying out this ablation, it is the externalisation.

One of the corollaries of the law of Parkinson, it is that, in any administrative status, one can save 20% of time periodically.

The law of Parkinson is also used to evoke a derivative of the original law in connection with the Ordinateur S: “The data extend until filling space available for their storage”; to acquire more memory encourages the use of greedy techniques in memory. It was observed that between the 1996 and 2006 use of memory on evolutionary systems tends to double about every 18 months. Fortunately, the quantity of memory available for a given sum also tends to double every 18 months (see Loi of Moore); unfortunately, the laws of physics ensure us that the second law will not be able to be checked indefinitely.

The law of Parkinson could be more generalized like: “The request for a resource always increases to correspond to the provisioning of the resource” (being connected then with the Loi of Say).

Parkinson proposed also a rule relating to the effectiveness of the boards of directors. He defines a Coefficient of inefficiency of which the most significant variable is the number of its members.

See too

the Principle of Peter
the Myth of the month-man

Reference

C. Northcote Parkinson, the Laws of Parkinson , transl. by Jerome de Villehouverte, prefaces Alfred Sauvy, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1983,
C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson' S Law, gold The Pursuit off Progress , 1957. The law of Parkinson in integral quotation
the law of Parkinson, The Economist , November 1955.

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