Day-to-Day Pareto

Pareto's Assertion (80:20 Rule) has a surprising level of application throughout life. The Assertion appears to empirically hold true whether the situation is keeping records, in doing maintenance, in working towards solutions, in dealing with Pain Points, in computer operations, In cyber security, in performance management and many more things in life. In short it encourages us to do a little bit of work now that will pay handsomly in the future. But its impacts to our mental state is probably even greater.

Accepting the 80:20 rule grants one a perspective that perfection is not achievable but that moving towards perfection is an achievable,practical and worthy goal. It allows the individual or organization a perspective to seek Value. It will also probably take you in a different direction along the way. And it provides you the basis to believe that that adjustment is OK. It also sets and limits ones expectations in that a lot can be initially achieved with modest effort but that that gets harder and harder. In fact it demonstates a mathmatical basis to understand the "Law of Diminishing Returns".

The table below charts out the Iteration, Effort, Value experience of Pareto's Assertion.

Iteration	Value	Effort	Multiplier	Working Value
Iteration 1	80% Value	20% effort	4x multiplier	80%.
Iteration 2	16% Value	20% effort	0.8x multiplier	96%
Iteration 3	3.6% Value	20% effort	0.18x multiplier	99.6%
Iteration 4	0.32% Value	20% effort	0.016x multiplier	99.92%
Iteration 5	0.064% Value	20% effort	0.0032x multiplier	99.984%

Whether your personal value for effort point is 2 iterations of 3 is a personal choice. Personally I put mine at about 2.25. But the interesting point is that you can get real value from something that is not "the Perfect Solution". In our modern thinking we seem to have lost this reality check.

This phenomenon is widespread. Some examples are:

• Simple Monitoring, like with AVLMonitoring, is 10000% better than none. It gives you the chance know something.
• A Windshield Cover placed before an ice storm makes leaving substantially easier and quicker. It will give you the chance to not have to scrape or only scrape a little.
• Documenting your interactions on contentious points with others makes social or legal challenges easier. It gives you the chance to know that you have a firm and consistent history, approach and request.
• Documenting your assumptions and formulas makes Tax or Budget presentations that much easier because you have the cost and the rationale for why it is that way. It gives you the chance to defend and justify a direction and choice.
• Simple Event Checks, Like SECEvents means you can look for past, present or future activities and begin a proactive approach to what is going on.
• Whitelisting, using simple tools like WhitelistToolKit ,will allow you to size, scope, manage, learn and understand what WhiteListing is and what is involved. You may actually learn that you have some problems you didn't know you had.

But each of these need only be a first or second iteration within what they should end up being or would need to run on a larger scale.

Review of the Deployment document for machines, folders, files, URLs and processes shifted deployment success rates from 80% to 98% over 18 months. Deployment document in Excel was a single worksheet either 5, 10, 25 or 50 units in size. This was always smaller than the previous Word doc. It was more complete in that it posed the right questions for each type of module to be deployed. It was simpler to fill out because it prompted for the inputs critical to get things right. It ended up also being simpler to follow not only because it flowed in order but it also ensured that critical questions were always explicitly answered. Initially it took 4 months of monthly updates to get the initial kinks worked out. Two more updates were also necessary to catch some of the less frequent deployment types and situations to work through. But getting the extra 18% of deployments through without slip counted towards FTE ays available to do real development work.
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Update 2021-02-01  rwh