I usually advise my students to encourage their team members to not provide padded work estimates, but rather to make schedule contingencies visible and tie these contingencies to milestones rather than to individual activities.

This is intended to counter the potential confluence of Parkinson's Law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion), Student Syndrome (let's wait till the very last possible moment to start an undesired activity) and Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong will go wrong).

While this behavior might be true in some circumstances, it is based on a rather Theory X view of the world. Student Syndrome hurts no one other than the student procrastinating on starting their homework assignments or preparing for an exam. With projects, the impact of delays from one team member ripple downstream to others so with the exception of that small minority of Homer Simpson-like workers most of us want to do a good day's work.

So if the fault doesn't lie with the individual contributors, where else could we look for answers?

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