The Engineering Manager

Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Although it is counter-intuitive, you will find that through practice and experience, there is a lot of truth to this. Projects that don't have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.

By setting challenging deadlines you will actually get better results. It's all about manipulating the Iron Triangle of scope, resources, and time.

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You can't change one without affecting the others. For example, if you want to do more work, then you're either going to need more people or more time. It's the embodiment of the "pick two" rule: you can have it good, fast, or cheap, but you can't have all three.

Back to Parkinson's Law: without tight time constraints, the scope of a team's project will expand to fill the time available. This is just human nature. Just look at how long my clean washing sits in the basket before I actually put it away, or how long those little DIY jobs around the house take to get done. With no deadline, there's no urgency, and so things just don't happen.

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