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Project Time Management - Beware of the 80/20 Trap

By: Michael Adams


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Time Management and Project Management are closely related because in both cases you're managing time (yours or the team members) and how long it takes to get tasks completed.

When I manage a project, I emphasize that each team member is responsible for developing their own abilities to manage their time and set schedule of their work. Beyond helping team members tune their ability to estimate how long a task will take for them, I'm often involved in reviewing their work and helping to make schedule adjustments along the way.

The "80/20 Trap" is one of the biggest pitfalls for team members new to scheduling and managing their own time.

Before continuing, I have to explain that I work with software developers. What I'm going to describe is my experience working with software developers, but is also something that other project and time managers can apply to their own situation or projects.

There's a version of the 80/20 rule for software which says "It takes 20% of the time to do the first 80% of the work and then 80% of the time to do the last 20% of the work".

It's a separate discussion whether the 80/20 rule I just described is truly the Pareto Principle, but suffice to say, I've seen it hold true more often than not during software development. The main reason it holds true is that as a feature is completed, there is usually a period of polish work and usability testing that must happen. This extra time can often take up to 3x or 4x the time it took to create the feature in the first place.

Smart project managers schedule usability and polish work as separate tasks from just implementing a feature, but most don't. Even if you do though, there is often a certain amount of debugging and clean up time a programmer needs to do just to get the feature ready for usability testing.

Knowing what you know now, consider the situation for a moment.

With this new understanding, you and I both know now that when a programmer claims to be 80% done with a feature, he's going to need more than 20% of the total time to finish is work. Taking 4 out of 5 scheduled days to do 80% of the work means that the programmer is late and unlikely to finish the feature within the next day.

Programming can a difficult job, but when neither the programmer or the manager understand this 80/20 rule, software delivery dates can slip wildly and repeatedly until things get under control.

It's not actually that hard to fall into the "80/20 Trap". I've even seen it happen to experienced people. The best thing to do when you see it is to address it right away, in a calm cool and professional manner.

In the situations where no one called out the "80/20 Trap", quality issues and problems just pile up on themselves each day that passes, making it even harder on everyone involved. Suffice to say, it's always best to address the issues as early as possible.

Beyond software, I think the idea of the "80/20 Trap" is useful to understand for all types of projects and can easily be adopted to them. Project and team size doesn't matter, the principle scales, even if it's just you managing your own time and a personal project.

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For additional strategies on time management, be sure you check out author Michael Adams' exclusive free report on tips for managing your time and multi-million dollar projects. Learn more at www.smart-time-management.com.



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