The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients."

Practical applications
The original observation was in connection with income and wealth. Pareto's noticed that 80% of England's wealth was owned by 20% of the population. He then carried out surveys on a variety of other counties and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

It also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: we wear our 20% most favoured clothes about 80% of the time, we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances etc.

The Pareto principle has many applications in quality control. It is the basis for the pareto chart, one of the key tools used in total quality control and six sigma. The Pareto principle serves as a baseline for ABC-analysis and XYZ-analysis, widely used in logistics and procurement for the purpose of optimizing stock of goods, as well as costs of keeping and replenishing that stock.

In computer science the Pareto principle can be applied to resource optimization by observing that 80% of the resources are typically used by 20% of the operations. In software engineering, it is often a better approximation that 90% of the execution time of a computer program is spent executing 10% of the code (known as the 90/10 law in this context).

In business, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by identifying the 20% of customers, activities, products or processes that account for the 80% of contribution to profit and maximising the attention applied to them.

An 'inverted' application of the Pareto priciple is the so-called 'long tail' focus in internet marketing. Rather than focusing on the high-popularity keywords for which there is a great deal of competition, some marketers have concentrated on the much larger number of obscure phrases that each get a few searches per month. Creating web pages that are search-engine-optimised for these is a less challenging task than for the small number of popular and highly competitive key phrases.

Mathematical notes
The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, but it is commonly misused. For example, it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem "fits the 80-20 rule" just because it fits 80% of the cases; it must be implied that this solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases.

Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants; however, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources. There is nothing special about the number 80, but many systems will have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

This is a special case of the wider phenomenon of Pareto distributions. If the parameters in the Pareto distribution are suitably chosen, then one would have not only 80% of effects coming from 20% of causes, but also 80% of that top 80% of effects coming from 20% of that top 20% of causes, and so on (80% of 80% is 64%; 20% of 20% is 4%, so this implies a "64-4 law").

One should not be seduced by the symmetry of the idealised case - 80-20 is only a shorthand for the general principle at work. In individual cases, the distribution could just as well be say 80-10 or 80-30. (There is no need for the two numbers to add up to 100%, as they are measures of different things, eg 'number of customers' vs 'amount spent'). The classic 80-20 distribution occurs when the gradient of the line is -1 when plotted on log-log axes of equal scaling.

Using Huthwaite S.P.I.N. Customer Education in Sales 

SPIN® is a questioning technique and is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff Questions. It is intended for large product or service sales and is developed by Neil Rackham.

For nearly thirty years Huthwaite has analysed over 40,000 sales interviews in 27 countries and studied 116 factors which might play some part in improving sales performance. Conclusion was that exceptional sales performers discover prospect or customer needs by the use of four types of questions, which are categorised by their purpose (function)

• Situation Questions – to gather background information and understand the context of the sale.
• Problem Questions – to explore the customer’s dissatisfactions and concerns.
• Implication Questions – that develop and link apparently isolated problems by examining their ‘knock-on’ effect on the areas of the customer’s business.
• Need-payoff Questions – that invite the customer to consider the benefits of solving his or her problems and, having done so, to express an Explicit Need for a solution ("if I can show you a proven way to find a permanent solution to this adverse situation, would you be willing to hear my brief presentation?").

A key factor in SPIN® is that it encourages the customer to define the problem and desire for a solution. Hence, the salesperson is viewed by the customer as a "consultant" rather than someone simply attempting to gain a sale. The SPIN® questioning/persuasive model has also been used by Huthwaite in a number of related models, including ones that cover Proposal writing, Presentations, SPIN for Marketers and the Huthwaite Major Sales Process.

Much of SPIN® selling focuses on the types of questions used to probe a potential buyer. The SPIN® question types must be understood as must the different types of needs that the questions are designed to uncover. These needs fall into two groups, Implied Needs (problems, concerns or worries about the current situation) and Explicit Needs (statements of a desire to act accompanied by an exploration of the value of acting).

Some of the following issues are discussed in SPIN® selling:

• statistical analysis of successful sellers
• why closing techniques are less relevant in large sales
• questioning skills
• dealing with price concerns and objections
• objection prevention
• selling new products
• working with professional buyers

Don't even think about doing this . . .

Having the right skills 

Q. What is Linux/Unix?

Q. Do we do Microsoft Windows? What Versions?

Q. Do we do Apple Macs? What Versions?

We can offer and develop for any of the main computer operating systems Linux,Microsoft Windows (any version) or Apple's Mac OS-X.

To know more read on though . . .

About thirty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines - computers - for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a spy satellite, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized." - put in a box and sold to ordinary people.

Put simply, Operating Systems - like Windows, Apple's Mac OS-X and Linux/Unix allow programmes written by computer programmers to talk to the computer. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tyres of a BMW. 

The first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They are to telegrams what you and I are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to say the same thing under a different name. All that you see on your computer screen--your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages, faxes, and word processing documents written in thirty-seven different typefaces--is still, from the computer's point of view, just like telegrams, except much longer, and demanding of more arithmetic.

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. An Operating System - like Windows, Apple's Mac OS-X and Linux/Unix - is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents--into the string of ones and zeros that are the only things computers know how to work with.

The Microsoft family of operating systems have evolved over many years basically from a system designed for ordinary users to use on cheap computers on their desktops. Many of the exact workings are trade secrets of Microsoft (called proprietory) so no-one who is trained in Windows really knows how it all works - they are essentially users or Microsoft technologies just like you are when you use Word or Excel. They have, however, normally been on expensive courses and accreditations and are often highly defensive and hostile to other operating systems. The status of operating systems commands almost religious zeal in programmers and National Web Design are not in the possition of missionaries - we will develop for whatever platform or OS our clients want - and we have a number of .net and Windows programmers.

Likewise Apple/Mac (Macintosh)  evolved over many years basically from a system designed for ordinary users to use on more expensive computers on their desktops. Until recently even more exact workings of Apple Operating Systems and computers were proprietory. Recently hoever Apple have made a huge change and moved over to a new operating system OS-X (versions are called Jaguar/Panther etc). This is a version of Linux, which is in itself a version of Unix - the sort of grand-daddy of OSs developed for huge mainframe and super-computers. It is Linux - the version of Unix that runs on ordinary desktop PCs that we generally recommend to our clients. Linux is what is known as Open Source - this means that htere areno hidden secrets anywhere - a really good programmer can know exactly how any part works and - if he or she wants - can change any part or Linux to do exactly what they need at any time.

Using Linux rather than Windows or other proprietory operating systems is exactly what companies like IBM and Google do to give their products a huge technical edge. Like Google users, our clients don't have to deal with the complexities but by having smarter, better trained staff we can offer more powerful applications to them by using this super-powerful technology.

It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. The gist of it is explained by the technology writer Neil Stephenson in the following anecdote  . .  about drills . . .

You need to be at least this good!

Purpose: To provide web realted services to corporate clients of National Web Design UK.

Type: Permanent, Full Time, Career Track. Starting Goa based 100%. Optionally some of these positions may develop to being Goa based, but with some work in the UK/EU or fully International. 

Roles Offered/Qualifications: fresh graduates with good communication in English. Must have pleasing personality and good fluency in English.

Primary Skills Required

Each applicant should have at least one primary skill. These are the ones which are needed to carry out National Web Design's everyday business.

• Software engineers with a 4 year engineering degree. Applicants will need a skillset including PHP/MySQL. The role will be to work with in the entire life cycle of the software system development. Roles and responsibilities include interacting with client to collect requirement, propose/ develop the entire architectural design of the system requirement, and also reviewing the work done by the peers in the team. Ability to implement the standards and best practices for software system development. System development. Roles and responsibilities include interacting with client to collect requirement, propose/ develop the entire architectural design of the system requirement, and also reviewing the work done by the peers in the team. Ability to implement the standards and best practices for software system development.
  
• Web Designer/Back Office with a BFA/degree/diploma in visual design/graphic design or PG (MFA/Any Visual Design course). Creative Thinker who can translate requirements into page-level design mockups Improvements to existing interfaces Converting mocks into HTML Detailed documentation of interface design, including aesthetic guidelines and screen-level interactions. Working closely with other Visual designers. Skills in problem-solving and troubleshooting on low-level visual design development task. Working closely with the technical team to ensure design meets product and technical requirements. Training clients.  Good oral and written communication skills. It's intended that we use N-View     for site design so candiates must be willing to migrate their existing skills and proficiency from Adobe or Microsoft web design products to design great HTML, DHTML, CSS and XML for us.
  
• Graphic Designer: Creative Designer well versed in Corel Paint Shop Pro.  Please provide your portfolio of websites / logos / banners / brochures. If you haven't got a portfolio please contact us about creating a suitable one for assessment.
• Google AdWords Certified Professionals

Secondary skills

Any combination of two of the above skills or one of the above and one of the below, and the willingness to flexibly apply your combination of skills as required automatically places candidates on a higher salary scale.

• Joomla Expert
  
• osCommerce Expert
  
• CLP (Certified Linux Professional)
• .NET
• Java J2EE
• HTML/CSS
• Non-designers with 2D design experience including packages by Adobe, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, etc Flash MX · web design concepts ·
  
• Copy writing
  

Salary/Package: Starting Salary will be approximately 100% higher than typical starting positions in Goa. We are commited to get the best people and pay at a rate similar to top MultiNational companies in Bangalore.

Prospects: These are long-term positions and the value of the salary package can increase by 24%-42% annually (performance related) with substantial bonuses and promotion to higher scales possible. Significant staff development training is provided and in the second and subsequent years this can include free time to contributing to Open Source projects to expand their reputation in the Open Source world 20% time similar to that in companies such as Google or outside training.

In the second and subsequent years we will support the best candidates ( average in our certification or above) to take higher qualifications such as the UK Open University Postgraduate Diploma in Management of Software Projects and Postgraduate Diploma in Computing for Commerce and Industry and the UK Open University Technology Management MBA as part of their package.

Timescale: Formation (planned) Summer 2007.

Position: National Web Design's IT Services Centre in Goa must provide all the technical needs of National Web Design Clients. Most projects are based on PHP, MySQL particularly around our own versions of Joomla!, osCommerce and to a lesser extend Ilias. Graphics and SEO skill will also be required. Custom work is also undertaken. The work includes specifying and testing. Initially we think that developers covering the skill sets - PHP, Back office (but very good/flexible etc), general web design and ideally graphic design.  Work is supported using our other Goan teams in Verna and Panjim Riverside and other sites outside India. 

Staff in the National Web Design IT Services Centre Goa will work normal UK hours (9am-5pm GMT/BST) Monday to Friday. There will be a 15 minute tea break at 10:30am and 3:30pm and a 30 minute lunch break at 12:30 giving a 7 hour work day.

UK hours 8am to 9am (Goan lunchtime) will be dedicated to training and education. Free healthy food and drink will be available. Training and Education slots are paid for out of the normal pay package.

Goan Mornings before 8am GMT/BST, Saturday and Sunday and all Public Holidays are free except during projects declared Urgent or Emergency when double (Goan Mornings before 8am GMT/BST Mon-Fri & Saturday) or triple (Sunday and all Public Holidays) pay scales.

All staff will be full time and dedicated to the projects. Staff may not work on external paid projects of any type.

Profile: Successful candidates will be highly motivated (not cynical or lazy - always willing to learn), reliable (if they are asked to do something it gets done - 100% certainty - without further ado), considerate of others (their clients, their colleagues, and sympathetic to the needs of the organization).  Individuality and character is valued, but clients must be offered consistent, professional experience from the company and one that inspires the highest level of confidence and trust.  

National Web Design is an Equal Opportunity Employer and employees advancement and career development is not limited or affected by race, sex, creed, religion, color, or national origin.