Look For The Big Fish

Haven't you heard about the Pareto Principle? It is one of the greatest principles to have come. What it says, if understood, can make you stand in good stead. Read carefully. The Pareto Principle says that 80 % of the results are due to 20 % of efforts and vice versa. While the percentage may vary a little, but it is true in every field that the biggest amount of results come due to least amount of effort. This Pareto Principle can apply to many different things. Like, 80 % of profit is due to 20 % of profit. Ratio might be 70-30 %, but this is true. The Pareto principle looks at the impact rather than the overall thing. If you are working for anything, you might just put all of your efforts on the 20 % efforts, which will bring in the maximum 75-80 % results. This is the Big fish and it will come with least efforts. But for this effort too, you have to work hard. 

Though I do not remember the exact example of things, but the story goes like this. There was one CFO in Cognizant. He was too young. But when he came, he did not focus much on the work. But he made different fish bone diagrams. The average delivery time of a project used to be more than 150 days. Just by making these fish bone diagrams, he was able to identify the bottlenecks and in a short time, made the average delivery time of a project to 34 days. Now, imagine that at a scale at which Cognizant is working, what must be the savings. This 1 % manpower or effort has been able to impact in such a way that the whole business cycle changed. 

The fish bone diagram is nothing but a loose structure where a horizontal line is drawn and other slanting lines are made. The horizontal line is the problem that we are looking at. The slanting lines are the components of the problem. Here all the reasons, all the parameters affecting the problems are identified. And at the end of it, reasons are identified. Action plan is made and by executing the actions, solutions are found. When you work with different reasons, we have to first find the big fish - the big reason by which we can achieve the best result. Because may be less efforts will be required there.