The 80/20 Principle: How to Delegate Tasks While Working on a Project

As a project manager or a team member who has been put in charge of a project, you have plenty of tools that will help you achieve a successful outcome. For one, you have the authority that goes with being a project manager. Then, you probably have a project management methodology to provide structure and guidance. If possible, you should have project management software tools at your disposal, as they can be incrediblyvaluable for several different reasons. 

And then there’s the Internet, the global repository of collective knowledge that holds many principles, methods, or information you will find useful. Of course, there are also plenty of methods, principles, or pieces of apparent wisdom that will not only be of questionable usefulness but will derail your project if you decide to take them to heart. However, if the piece of online wisdom you’ve come across is called “the 80/20 principle,” don’t disregard it too quickly. It might be just the thing you need to take your project management to the next level.

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Top 5 Tips To Excel Your Project's Productivity

As a Project Manager, do you struggle to share crucial information between your team members and worry too often about its confidentiality? Does any of the common phrases quoted below strike your mind often?

• Had I known before, I would have done it differently.
• I wasn’t aware that we had a template for that!

On a general note, different people in a team come with different ideologies and philosophies. Being a Project Manager, you need to ensure that all the requisite information should get into the heads of the respective project team members who need to know it at the right time. Once they are well aware of what is expected out of them, it becomes easier to convey the project goals and it becomes their sole responsibility to take care of their respective job roles and contribute effectively towards the overall productivity of the project.

Here are 5 tips that a Project Manager and his team should follow to enhance the project’s productivity thereby expediting its final delivery. Let’s explore some of the possibilities to accelerate your project development and overall growth and productivity:

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Scope, Scope Creep & Its Impact on Project Delivery

Project Management and Project Delivery seemingly harmless words; but can run businesses to the ground when gone wrong. It is not as simple as moving from one point to the other or setting a goal and distributing the activities among a set of people and arriving at it happily. If you are one of those Project Managers who thinks things are this simple – you are lucky!

Projects are complex endeavors with 100s of moving parts. Pick any project from your experiences so far and analyze. You will find elements like resources, time, budget, milestones, defined deliverables, company direction, change of stakeholders, change of stakeholder requirements, market conditions, competition, acts of nature etc. that need to be assessed and planned for.

You miss to account for one of them & if it skews in an unwanted direction your entire project runs the risk of crumbling like a house of cards.

Agreed that we cannot humanely control all of these elements but definitely a few of them and mainly the critical ones –

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Monitor Performance of Your Agile Scrum Teams with Velocity Chart

Velocity is a key performance indicator for any agile scrum team to measure how much work has been delivered for each sprint. It helps Product Owners to have a clear view on future sprints and on the workload of the team.

It also facilitates very accurate forecasting of how many stories a Team can do in a Sprint. For forecasting purposes the average of the last three Sprint’s Velocity should be used.

Without Velocity, Release Planning is impossible. By knowing Velocity, a Product Owner can figure out how many Sprints will it take for the Team to achieve a desired level of functionality that can then be shipped. Depending on the length of the Sprint, the Product owner can fix a date for the release.

To calculate the velocity of your agile team, simply add up the estimates of the features, user stories, requirements or backlog items successfully delivered in an iteration and compare it with the committed estimation.

In short, you can measure the productivity of your agile team using the velocity report.

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Agile Project Management with Scrum Boards, Backlog & Sprints in OrangeScrum

It is well known that Scrum is one of the most popular framework of Agile Project Management methodology.

A 2013 survey showed that over 56% of all software development projects which are managed using an agile method are using Scrum.

And this percentage of scrum users are increasing for the simple fact that – Scrum is simple, straightforward, and easy to implement compared to other iterative and incremental development methodologies out there.

Scrum helps teams address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value and quality.

This is the very reason why we have released the “Scrum” framework of agile project management in OrangeScrum SaaS (Cloud) edition.

So, let’s see how you can implement agile project management with OrangeScrum. Before we start, let me explain few scrum terminologies you should know.

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