Managing Project Teams - 80/20 Rule
The thing that really makes some project managers better than others is the ability to successfully manage people (a type of resource) to complete the project within scope, schedule and budget. If your project team doesn’t perform as expected, then it reflects bad on you as the project manager. All the other stuff helps but people are the ones that will get you off-course.
Jared at Technotheory wrote about applying the 80/20 rule to your friendships. His post reminded me of the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle) applied to management. As it goes, 80% of the work is produced by 20% of your people . I agree, there are definitely key people on every project team. The act of listing and analyzing a project team for the 80/20 rule could prove useful to some project managers.
So, what is the 80/20 response? Well, according to productivity theories that apply the 80/20 rule, we should look at the 20% of our time and effort that is getting 80% of our work done. Looking at our efforts to communicate, is only 20% of it aimed at those key project team members? Are we spending 80% of our efforts communicating to the other members who are only producing 20% of the work?