Yet, he suddenly found himself leading a project that involved more than 100 volunteers. The project manager was a lead engineer, a sharp developer who could code an iPhone application all by himself in a matter of weeks. One project manager, however, seemed to find a way around this predicament. The project leaders are usually brilliant at their technical job but don't excel at management. Most volunteers remain "observers," which means they remain waiting for assignments - indefinitely. Most of the time, these engineer project leaders (I include myself here too, by the way) fail to engage the community. Lead engineers looking to leverage community IT talent for their projects often find themselves in management roles, without a strong understanding of how to manage a large group of people. These management theories are more relevant with our community volunteer efforts. He's not a former technical writer, but rather a former developer. He negotiates projects and budget, and interacts with other product owners throughout the organization to solicit more work for our group. In fact, my manager has a consulting background. I find the whole topic of management somewhat fascinating, not because I think these theories apply to my own manager. Either the wrong person fills the wrong role, the role exists only to minimize damage control, or the role swells unnecessarily simply because it can. None of these principles or laws gives much credit to management. People without any work find ways to increase the amount of "work" and therefore add to the size of their bureaucracy. In other words, a bureaucracy may swell not because the workload increases, but because they have the capacity and resources that allow for an increased workload even if the workload does not in fact increase. (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other." notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by 5-7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done". Parkinson says that bureacracies swell for two reasons: Parkinson's Law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Although this law has application with procrastination, storage capacity, and resource usage, Parkinson focuses his law on swelling bureaucracies. You can see the Dilbert principle play out in The Office, Office Space, and other parodies of corporate culture. The Dilbert Principle assumes that " the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder." Those in management don't actually do anything to move forward the work. In contrast to the Peter Principle, which seems to promote competent employees out of good faith (though it works toward the employees' detriment), Dilbert sees management as a place to stuff the incompetent so they are no longer blocking the productive workflow of the company. "companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing." The Dilbert Principle is related to the Peter Principle, but the Dilbert Principle states that Your technical skills lie dormant while you fill your day with one-on-one meetings, department strategy meetings, planning meetings, budgets, and reports. There you sit - you have risen to a level of incompetence. You may have no interest in managing other programmers, but it's the reward for your competence. After a couple of years, you're promoted to lead programmer, and then promoted to team manager. You spend your days coding with amazing efficiency and prowess. There they remain.įor example, let's say you are a brilliant programmer. The Peter Principle states that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." In other words, employees who perform their roles with competence are promoted into successively higher levels until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. I hadn't, so I read about them on Wikipedia, as well as a related principle, the Dilbert Principle. Academic/Practitioner Conversations ProjectĪfter my last post about being an individual contributor, a reader asked if I had heard of the Peter Principle or Parkinson's Laws.Author in DITA and Publish with WordPress.Reflecting seven years later about why we were laid off.A hypothesis about influence on the web and the workplace.
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