80/20 Rule for Agile Leaders

When your efforts pay and gains success achieving the desired aim makes you work more. But then working hard, smart work is required in today’s modern days. Understanding where to put efforts for maximum benefits is what requires for planning.

The Pareto principle or 80/20 rule explains how putting effort into the right things is important. It stated that only 20% of your work helps you achieve 80% of results. So understanding and putting efforts at the right place is what requires gaining your aim. Prioritization of work with ruthless management is what required accomplishing the goals most of the time but we avoid doing the needful. The 80/20 rule makes us understand that doing things is not what always is doing the best thing.

The 80/20 rule not just applies to effort in project work but it can be seen in every aspect. If we see that almost 80% of wealth is with 20% of people in the country, 80% of revenue is gained from 20% of product taxes, 80% of crime is done by 20% criminals, and so on. It may not be always exact 80 and 20 but the proportionate is almost nearly equally where we see that the minimum amount provides the maximum results.

Agile has always supported the concept of smart work and developed its processes and concept on it. We can even say that agile has already implemented the 80/20 rule in creating and formation of it hence making it an important concept. When leaders in agile follow the 80/20 rule and implement it while prioritizing and allocating work to team members they can obtain maximum benefits from it. Agile leaders like scrum masters and product owners can use it for improving their results as well as of team’s performance. It will help agile leaders in avoiding chaos and bring clarity step by step. How this can be achieved is explained in the following options.

Not every task provides an equal amount of results. Some take more time but give less impacting results whereas, some take less time to complete but give more impacting benefits. The leaders while organizing their time and resources must choose wisely.  

Focusing on Long-Term Goals

Agile leaders must focus their attention and time on long-term achievements. This will focus your team on short-term sprints. Leaders must break their time into putting their 80% attention on planning and thinking in long term and 20% attention and thinking on short-term goals.

Prioritizing Valuable Products

The second method for agile leaders to apply the 80/20 rule is to go through their to-do list and find 20% of their most strategic advantage-providing tasks and then give them 80% of their attention. This task may include any type of work like adding a new feature, product, code, or even project, or updating them or it can even be an area that is causing a lot of problems or complaints from customers. Once found out such tasks allocate the timeframe to them from the available time of the team. While doing so you can also see how much of the task can be completed within 80% of the available time and keep the remaining 20% for the tactical upcoming tasks that arrive without warnings.

Sorting the Most Valuable Customers

It is always difficult to sort out the most valued customers for your organization but the 80/20 rule helps in sorting it out for agile leaders. The 80/20 rule follows a similar pattern even if we keep on narrowing the search. Agile leaders with available data can observe that the 805 profit of their organization comes from 20% of their loyal customers. Even if this sorting is narrowed further for a particular duration or product the rule will bring out the same result of 20% customers. With this agile leaders can use this rule and zero the most valued customers. The ‘valued’ meaning will be dependent on the agile leaders.

Without the 80/20 rule, even an agile project will become noisy and distracting. This absence of the 80/20 rule will result in losing focus of team members, suffering of product, and put you in havoc. With more accurate understanding and work the result obtained will be also more accurate providing you with the best outcomes. 80/20 provides a way for every agile worker to find the most important task or thing that can help them gain the maximum output from the activities they do.

 About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.