Jan 8, 2009

The Law of Ever Lasting Group Work.

We at B-Schools, learn the art / Science / myth of time management. Concepts like JIT, Optimisation etc are words that we throw around left right and centre. Yet as MBA students we always find, that we never have enough time to get things completed.

In an MBA School, however you do not work alone, you work in groups. And so, the logic goes, that you have more number of man hours to do something, and therefore lesser number of real hours to get that job completed. (Simple 8th standard Mathematics, If you cant recall, it was CH:8 in Maharashtra Board Text Books.)

But this is an MBA school, and we set "New Paradigms", and create a "Proccess Shift", meaning the ways in which things are done. And these "Proccess SHIFTS" fly in the face of any logic you learn all your life from that CH8 of your maths text book.

So here we coin a new law; the "Law Of Everlasting Group Works"

Law of Everlasting Group work: Consider a job which requires 'X' hours to complete by a single person. The LOEGW says that the number of hours taken to complete it in a group will be X * Y Hours, where 'Y' is the number of people working on the issue.
Even Einstein will turn in his grave.
-- Gunjan Bothra
SPJIMR Batch 2008 -2010 (Finance)

2 comments:

Vaibhav said...

Nice law... especially true in most MBA courses.

Unknown said...

Corollaries for Law of Everlasting Group Work -

- The Selection Software some how has the knack of selecting a group in which there will be one and only one person who will be doing most of the work .

-The "Quality" of the assignment is inversely proportional to the number of people contributing in the assignments.

- There is a negative correlation and low R square value between the number of people doing the assignment the marks obtained.