Perspectives & Strategy

The 80-20 Rule suggests that 80 percent of your return comes from 20 percent of your investment. IT has had a version of this rule since its very inception, including some of the following:

• 80 percent of time and effort goes into deploying the 20 percent requiring the most customisation.
• Developers spend 80% of their time debugging applications and 20% writing new code.
• Getting 80% competent as a developer isn’t really hard — but that last 20% to go from competent to great is really, really tough

Even the business world has its versions of this rule e.g. “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.” Each of these has a certain element of truth in it, but they should be seen as a guideline rather than as a hard rule. In the old days when I used to cut code my own version was that I spent 80% of my time on the toughest 20% of functionality. Now there is is a new rule in the operational computing world. When it comes to running a computer program 90% of the execution time is spent executing just 10% of the code.

So is this all just a bunch of stats dreamed up by academics and management to justify the amount of time taken to deliver solutions?

It could be argued that IT leaders have been leveraging the 80-20 rule in order to maintain budgetary control. I would argue the reverse. Because IT spends more effort making things 100% perfect, would it not be better to live with 80% of the functionality and minimise unnecessary expenditure?

It is my belief that the type of deployment or development will aid cost saving. There is a law of diminishing returns that applies in all circumstances. Agile deployment, for example, is the 80-20 Rule at work. It emphasizes speed and adaptation to changing business realities, including the option to decide when the delivery is good enough. It is important to deliver the features of most value to the bottom line of business, other functions can be axed or delayed till later stages. Also project delivery is not about being fast, but about the quality & effectiveness of the delivery to the business.

Agile delivery will also allow the option to stretch out all delivery timelines for the current period. To acheive this you reduce the number of active projects and the size of the teams.