Pareto’s Law and Web Development
Vilfredo Pareto is the guy who noticed in the 1800’s that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by only 20% of people. Pareto’s Law is also known as the 80 / 20 rule.
20% of your effort amounts to 80% of your effect - and the inverse applies that 80% of your effort simply amounts to 20% of your effect. Similarly you’ll make 80% of your money off 20% of your customers (and I guess that’s a good reason to spend extra effort on that end of your clientelle). Apparently that’s all true.
Pareto’s Law is an economic principle that applies so widely to other aspects of life that you can’t go anywhere without hearing about the 80 / 20 rule. Web development isn’t any different. In the end you have to look at the problem space and consider that you can’t achieve perfection, nor total accessibility or any other outright objective. Ours is a world of educated decisions, managerial satisficing and to some extent compromise between many stakeholders (users, clients, investors).
Ours is a world where the more we know about technologies and human behaviour the better we can make educated decisions about how to serve them effective content for the best conversion rate to sales / relationships.
Web project management is about achieving the best success given the resources and information available to the team at the time. Don’t beat yourself up about not achieving perfection because at some point you’re going to be pushing deeper and deeper into the 20% of effect for 80% of effort and maxing out the budget on trivial detail. You seem to always look at code and see somewhere you can squeeze just that little more efficiency. But at what cost in effort?
There’s a limit to what you can code or design within a deadline. Its just about knowing when enough is enough in one direction and pushing headway toward another - maximising that 20% of effort and managing the 80% on the other side of the scale.
