Part of “Project Management” involves managing the time of project team members and the time it takes to complete project tasks.
Beyond simply being the guy in charge, a good project manager helps team members develop their own time management and scheduling skills. Another part of the job is reviewing the work done on the project and evaluating whether the project will be delivered on time.
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen when it comes to team members scheduling their time, is when they fall into what I call the “80/20 time trap” or more simply the “80/20 Trap”.
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).
With practice, smart project managers will usually create a separate task and schedule for the polish and usability testing time for each feature, but some don’t. No matter whether they do or not, the programmer usually has to spend extra time doing debugging or clean up on his code just to get the feature ready for polish or usability testing.
Now that you understand the 80/20 rule about software development, think about the situation for a moment with me.
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.
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.
If you don’t and everyone just waits to see what happens, you’ll have quality issues and just have to deal with the delay at a later date (like at the end of the cycle) when there is even less time and flexibility for getting things done well.
The concept of the “80/20 Trap” can be applied across a wide range of projects. It makes sense to adopt it to whatever you’re working on, whether it is a multi-million dollar project or just managing your own time.