Not all customers are created equal. I have heard stories about close encounters with clients that have realistic deadlines. As a Project Manager you probably think that most clients are asking schedules that cannot be done. They want the software tomorrow. Actually yesterday, but even customers see that this would be impossible. If the person that is hiring you to do the job has no idea about scopes, budgets and requirements, it probably is just plain ignorance, or stubbornness; in either case, not of any interest for me right now, as I want to focus on a different situation. The client is knowing what he is talking about, and still demanding almost unrealistic or, at least, very risky deadlines. Why on earth would you ask something that you know cannot be done, and perhaps not needed in the indicated time frame anyway?

Parkinson's Law

The blame is all on the account of an English author by the name of C. Northcote Parkinson. He wrote during the 1950s a statement that is now known as "Parkinson's Law": "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." [1] If you give a person an amount of time to do a certain job, he will use all the time that he gets, regardless if he actually needs this amount. Together with the notion of the "Student Syndrome" it doesn't paint a pretty picture of the morale of employees. The "Student Syndrome" refers to the fact students ask for extensions on deadlines for homework, because they "can do a better job then" [2]. It is merely a kind of procrastination. Same as studying for an exam at the last possible moment. It is this conventional wisdom that makes the customer squeeze his deadline.

If people are using all the time they get, why not give them less, and the work also gets done. If people are procrastinating and start only on their job with the deadline in sight, your risk of a delay when something goes wrong is immediate. You have lost all the buffer you put into the estimate of the task. If you give someone 5 days for a 3 day job, you have two days for "just in case". Your buffer. If the first three days are wasted with nothing, and then something pops up, you have directly a delay. To avoid this, just say that you need it sooner, put pressure on the deadline. A smart manager knows his laws and syndromes and will give you perhaps less time, then he has available. Just so he has his own secret buffer, and he avoids you and your team slacking off, using all the time to surf the Net, instead of working for him. Smart move. Being a smart cookie yourself, you perform the same trick, and before you know it the developer only gets 40% of the time allocated, of the total time available, just because all the organizational layers above him acted upon the common wisdom of management.

Developer Doesn't Get More Productive With Less Time

Does it work? Is this developer more productive when he gets less time? Guess what… No! [3] If deadlines are perceived as unrealistic, and the impossible has to be done, morale drops big time and productivity is beyond repair. The best productivity rates seem to be produced when estimates are thought of as being accurate, by all parties. It seems that skimming schedule is counter productive and therefor a dangerous thing to do. How did this notion come so wildly spread? I grew up with it as a Project Manager. I told programmers always other deadlines I agreed upon with the customer. Even I was convinced of the truth. Parkinson formulated his "law" based upon some anecdotes from a fictional bureaucracy [3]. It became wildly popular because it his a nice sweet ring to it, is incredible funny, and has some truth in it.

The essence lied within the fact that people in this fictional agency were bored out of their skull and absolutely not motivated in their work. The same holds for the much acclaimed "Student Syndrome"; think about why you procrastinated during college. You were not jumping from joy to study for the exam, or to write that final paper. You just keep postponing it as much as you can. The key to both "problems" seems to be a lack of motivation to perform the job in the first place. This managerial wisdom is very common. It is so in the public domain, it is not only known within managerial worlds, the rest of the world is also in on this secret, and anticipates this. The know that if they get a deadline, it will not be the "ultimate" deadline, there is room to negotiate. In the end, it makes the net effect of the whole endeavor almost useless. In the words of DeMarco and Lister [3]: "The decision to apply schedule pressure to a project needs to be made in much the same way you decide whether or not to punish your child: If your timing is impeccable so the justification is easily apparent, the it can help. If you do it all the time, it's just a sign that you've got troubles of your own."

How did this piece of knowledge get so widely known? Like stated before, it is catchy, it is funny and it has some truth in it. However, within the social group of managers, especially of Scientific Management descent, there is a real difference between them and "the workers". Managers do the smart part, the thinking, the planning and the employees execute the tasks that is entirely spelled out to them. So every piece of evidence that workers are indeed not capable of planning work, is instant group folklore. Because the planners are separate from the people that actually do the work and have the knowledge, the estimates are often wrong and unrealistic, leading to bad performance, leading to more fuel and "evidence" of Parkinson's Law. In the end, if the customer want his software tomorrow, he will end up getting it over a month. Perhaps, had he agreed to two weeks, he would have gotten it in two weeks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_syndrome
[3] Peopleware, Productive Projects and Teams, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister