Reprinted Articles

Part of “Project Management” involves managing the time of project team members and the time it takes to complete project tasks.

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.

Although I work with software developers, I believe that the “80/20 Trap” is something that applies in one form or another across many different types of projects and is important as a general concept for almost every project or time manager.

A common application of the 80/20 rule in software is described in these terms: “For any software task, the last 20% of the work takes up to 80% of the total time for the task”.

I’m not sure that’s a proper application of the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle), but it seems to hold true in many cases because there is often a level of polish and usability testing after a feature is complete. This polish and usability testing often takes more time than anyone expects even as much as 4x the time to create the original feature (thus the 80/20 rule).

Creating a separate schedule for polish time and usability testing is the smart thing to do, but some managers forget to do it. Even if the project manager does schedule these two sets of work separately from feature development, the programmer will still often need more time than expected to simply debug or clean up his feature for the polish/usability testing phase.

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

If a team member comes up to me and says “I’m 80% done with this feature and I’m on track because I spent 4 out of my 5 scheduled days so far”, you now know as well as I do, that this team member isn’t going to finish their feature within the scheduled time allowed (in this case it was a total of 5 days).

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.

Suffice to say, the best answer is to address the fact that if only 80% of the feature is done and 80% of the time has passed (”80/20 Trap”), you need to address the issue of being late right away knowing that the last 20% of the work can indeed take up to 80% of the total time to get it done.

When you see it and don’t address it, you’re just pushing your problems in front of you, and things will get worse each day the project progresses. In other words, you’ll pay for it at some point so you might as well deal with it as soon as possible.

Whether you make software or not, use this notion of the “80/20 Trap” to help raise the predictability of your delivery dates, not matter what type of project you’re working on, whether you’re only working with yourself or managing any sort of team.

Last 5 posts by Michael Adams

• Fast Track Your Career - These Time Management Tips Really Work - May 25th, 2008
• Time Management - How To Use Your Environment To Your Advantage - May 10th, 2008

Tags: Time Management