3 Factors Causing Negative Effects in Projects

A project is not only the development of, for example, software or project documentation for construction. A project is any activity with clear time frames, yielding a unique result in the form of products, services, achievements, and proceeding according to a pre-established plan. Therefore, almost every manager in their daily work is connected with projects.

No matter how much time is required for each individual task within a project, it is important to complete the entire project on time. Regardless of the type of activity, there is always a need to complete several projects faster and with fewer costs.

The Theory of Constraints methodology for project management – Critical Chain – highlights three factors in project management that almost inevitably cause the following negative effects:

1. Poor Multitasking Poor multitasking is the process of stopping a task before completion to do other work perceived as more urgent or important. Every time a task is stopped, there are immediate efficiency losses due to the need to remember details and “get back” to the task from the same point when it resumes. Complex cognitive tasks may require significant time to return. What’s worse, stopping a task delays subsequent tasks that cannot start until the previous one is finished. This results in an overall project implementation delay.
2. Student Syndrome Student syndrome is related to the phenomenon that most people fully engage with a task only at the very last moment before the deadline, similar to how a student begins studying the night before an exam. The student syndrome is one form of procrastination.
3. Parkinson’s Law Parkinson’s Law is an observation that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Every worker strives to be busy all the time to avoid appearing idle. Bureaucracy generates enough internal work to keep itself always “busy” and justify its existence without commensurate benefits.

A bureaucrat, considering himself overloaded, hires two subordinates to do his job. He can’t share it with his already working colleagues, nor can he hire one subordinate and share it with him – no one needs competitors. The story repeats as his employees hire employees for themselves. Now seven people are doing the work of one. Everyone is very busy, but neither the work speed nor its quality increases.

How to Avoid This:

1. Don’t Think for Everyone Don’t expect someone to show respect if you don’t show it yourself. If you want your team to take deadlines and work seriously, try to get real commitment, not forced agreement.
2. Don’t Set a Deadline “Yesterday” Firstly, it irritates everyone, and you don’t want to work among psychopaths. Secondly, meeting a deadline “yesterday” is impossible, which means deadlines will be missed. They will be missed once, twice. What will you do then? Fire everyone? Unlikely. And if nothing happens after that, what then? Why try to meet the deadline ahead of time?
3. Don’t Strive for 100% Utilization For 100% utilization (which is not real), we invented machines; humans need to rest. Also, they need time for personal development and to wipe the dust off the keyboard. Why rush to finish a task ahead of time when a new one will immediately come? Then there will be no time for anything.
4. Don’t Pretend That After the Deadline, the World Ends Firstly, it’s not true, and see point 2. Secondly, nobody wants to get a scolding, and everyone lays a backup. The problem is that delays will still accumulate, but advances won’t. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote well about this in the book “The Goal 2.”
5. Don’t Fix Everything Don’t draw a mythical constraints triangle and try to fit your project into it. If you want to get Sagrada Familia, be prepared to wait for a hundred years. If you need it by Thursday, be flexible.
6. Do Not Encourage Multitasking Firstly, it’s not productive. Secondly, everyone solves their optimization problem. And getting 2 new assignments instead of sitting on a finished one doesn’t seem like a good idea.
7. Don’t Delay Approval Seriously. It takes 2 days to complete the work, and then another 2 weeks to wait for the manager/client to review and suggest edits. And then we wonder why everyone delays until the deadline.
8. Avoid the Big Bang Don’t delay with one big delivery; work incrementally. It may not make the work faster, but at least you can use something without waiting for months.
9. Don’t Inflate the Team If you don’t want to be like British officials from Parkinson’s Law.