RE: Deming's 80/20 Rule

["Templeton, Peter" <ptemplet@alarismed.com>]

Ian Schoeman wrote:

>> This could be why Juran proposed using the terms "trivial many" and 
"vital few".  I do however not like the idea of referring to a small 
percentage of customers as "trivial".  As I have found in industry, a 
small customer csn become a big customer and a big customer a 
small one.

As I recall, Juran later revised his wording to "the vital few and the
USEFUL many".
I think it adequately addresses the above concern.

>> I would also like to know where Deming quoted the Pareto Principle w.r.t 
efficiency of an organisation (if in fact he did so).  

I'm not sure I recall Deming making much reference to the Pareto principle.
I don't think it is anything to which he would have claimed ownership - I am
pretty sure it is much more closely associated with Juran.

Something that would interest me relating to Pareto analysis.  Its power is
its
ability to help prioritise so that the biggest gains are realised earliest.
Yet this
assumes that each cause needs to be addressed in isolation - the biggest
problem first, then the next, and so on.

I recently encountered a problem relating to a software codebase where
most of the modules were subject to the same weakness.  Application of a
single measure to all of them represented an opportunity to significantly
reduce the total 'useful many'.  I don't think that conventional use of
Pareto
would have led me down that path.  Looked at another way, we were dealing
with a common cause, requiring a single act of process improvement,
albeit one that required small modifications of a large number of modules.

Peter Templeton
Principal Software / System Engineer
e-mail: ptempleton@iee.org
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