(… and it’s impacts on Home Office Work)
In this talk we will have a look at the well-known Parkinson’s Law and its corollaries. Does work really expand or shrink to the time we give it? How does it correlate with estimations and how does this play out with new ways of working? Several agile paradigms have been altered out of necessity during the pandemic. Some things are being viewed differently now, given with all that we learnt during this time.
So how do old theories now fare given the new knowledge. Were they ever valid and are they valid now?
We want to inspect what we have learnt in the last years and share those findings with you.
Learning objectives:
- Is Parkinsons Law really applicable? (and is it a law indeed?) - How does Homeoffice change work in regards to time? - Why is there less conflict when working distributed? - Is absence of conflict desirable."
3. WHAT IS A
SCIENTIFIC
LAW
Scientific laws summarize the results of
experiments or observations, usually
within a certain range of application.
A scientific law may be contradicted,
restricted, or extended by future
observations.
10. DIFFERENT
TYPE OF
TIMEBOXES
The scheduled meeting / scheduled task
The working day/ the working week
A scrum sprint
The project duration
A calendar year / a fiscal year
11. TIMEBOX VS. TODO LIST
Limit the time for a given task
Easier to schedule tasks due to pre-
decided duration
Reduced risk of gold plating
Challenges:
How much time to allot for a Task
What to do if the Allotted Time is wrong?
Tasks are unlikely to be unfinished
Time allotment to tasks is flexible
Reduced progress predicability
Risk of tasks stying undone due to
reprioritizing
12. TIMEBOX
SIZING
EXPERIMENT
Drawing Game - Meisterwerke
Rules: One player describes the picture, the other
player has to draw it.
Each picture has ten statements that have to be
checked with the drawing. These are not known to
both players up front. For each statement that can be
checked correct one point is given.
20. COMMUNICATION
MODEL - ALISTAIR
COCKBURN
• ERG SECOND - ARGH MINUTE
• OSMOTIC COMMUNICATION
• INFORMATION RADIATORS
• BUS LENGTH COMMUNICATION
PRINCIPLE
Alistair Cockburn - Agile Software Development: The cooperative game
21. CONFLICT
RESOLUTION
AND
HOMEOFFICE
Reasons for remote conflict may be
because of the remote work
paradigma.
Conflict resolution in remote work has
to be handled differently from
conflict resolution in collocated work
Conflict resolution in remote work is
more likely to be superficial
Key factors for conflicts in remote
work are missing feedback loops
22. REMOTE
WORK AND
PARKINSON’S
LAW
Because of higher cost of communication, the
overhead in communication has to be
accounted for in the planning of the timebox
Missing feedback loops can adversely
affect this communication overhead
Determination of what is not working /
working differently because of Parkinson’s
law is more difficult to assess.