The 80-20 Rule for PPM Tools

Wayne leads product marketing for Oracle | Primavera and previously served as VP of Marketing for cloud PPM leader Instantis before it was acquired by Oracle.

  Portfolio Management   ProjectsAtWork  

When implementating a program or portfolio management solution, it is better to have 80 percent of the potential users of the system (adoption rate) using 20 percent of the system functionality, than to have 20 percent of the users exercising 80 percent of the system functionality.

The 80-20 rule (also commonly known as the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) exist in many aspects of our lives and work. It states that for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. Business-management consultant Joseph Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20 percent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas.

There’s also an 80-20 rule for the successful deployment of enterprise software such as project, program and portfolio Management (PPM) systems, and it goes like this:

It is better to have 80 percent of potential users of the system (i.e., adoption rate) using 20 percent of the system functionality, than to have 20 percent of the users exercising 80 percent of the system’s functionality.

This may strike you as odd in that it seems to emphasize quantity (of users) over …

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