Murphy Lives!
Every marketing project manager becomes quite familiar with the ways of Murphy’s Law when working with various projects simultaneously.
Where Did Murphy's Law Originate?
Legend has it that Col. John Stapp, who headed research project MX981 at Muroc Army Air Field (later renamed Edwards Air Force Base ), gave a press conference where he mentioned that some measurement devices using new technology developed by Edward A. Murphy had had some anomalies during testing of a rocket sled.
Murphy's First Law
As Murphy has proven to most project managers, anything that can go wrong will go wrong and remember, Murphy was an optimist. Everything that goes wrong is usually in direct proportion to the amount of time left in your project. The less time you have left to recover, the higher the likelihood of it going wrong. There are many other Murphy's Laws, and we'll go over some of them in this article.
The goal of every project manager should be to anticipate scenarios that can put a project off track and be prepared for them!
Things Can and Do Go Wrong
How to Overcome Murphy's Law
Though the things that may go wrong with a project can be endless and unique to every marketing project, there are several fundamental items that should be on your radar at the start of every lead generation marketing project.
Don't let Murphy's Law hammer you!
Some important items on your prep list should include:
- Murphy’s Law says “Information Required Won’t Be Available When Needed”.
Solution: Create an organized back-up system of pertinent information including files and supplementary material, so if an assigned team member is away, the lead generation project can move forward with minimal hassle.
Doesn't Need to Be a Complex System: We have an excellent article on how to set up and maintain a project folder system. There's really no need to over-complicate this.
- Murphy’s Law says “Project Scope Will Stray and Create Havoc on Deadline Day”.
Solution: Establish various check- in points with the team and the client. This way, throughout the lifecycle of the project, any changes of scope can be corrected before the deadline.
- Murphy’s Law says “When Money is Tight, Project Costs Will Put Up a Fight”.
Solution: When creating budgets, always create a buffer amount that will cover extra labor and expense costs that may have not been expected in the beginning of the project.
Scope Document Must Be Clear: Scope creep is a common term you will hear about projects going over budget or their timeline. That's why a deliverables oriented, with an agreed upon Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), is required before initiating your project.
Project Change Control: While a marketing project may seem to be completely different than an IT project, when it comes to project change control, they are mostly the same. The project manager must setup and get agreement upon a project change control procedure at the beginning of every project. If this is not done, the scope will change and the work will continue to expand to fill the available time.
- Murphy’s Third Law says "Everything Takes Longer Than You Think It Will"
Translation: Project Cushion Is Not Enough.
Solution: To keep in line with production timelines always give a deadline that is a couple days early. This will allow some leeway to avoid last minute deadline fiascos with shipping and production issues.
Time Estimates are Inversely Proportional to Uncertainty: When you ask members of your marketing team to estimate how long one of their assigned tasks will take, the more uncertain they are about their ability to complete it, the more time they will add to their estimate. Remember, a carelessly planned project takes three times longer than expected; a carefully planned project will only take twice as long.
- Murphy’s Law says “Review a Hundred Times and Still Have Mistakes”.
Solution: Create a routing process on all projects that allows each assigned team member to make sure that all proper measures and required tasks were implemented on the project correctly. This also allows others to catch things that may have been overlooked.
Create and Use Checklists: In the Air Force, there are checklists that must be followed for every process you do on an airplane. These checklists were developed initially be engineers, but were constantly (and continue to be) updated due to human errors being committed during day-to-day operations. You should study your past projects and make checklist for every tasks you do. For example, if you want to SEO a page, there are at least 250 items you should check. Those should be converted into a checklist, which can then be handed off to the appropriate member of your team.
Be Prepared for Anything
As project managers, being equipped for scenarios that can potentially create project dismay will not only save time and money, but also maintain overall team and client satisfaction. So on those days when Murphy’s Law seems to rule the day, remember that with the appropriate preparation, you can prevail!
Some Other 'Murphy Laws'
While we wanted to be sure to cover what we consider the 'Top Five' Murphy's Laws and other laws, we thought it might be useful to provide some others we've personally experienced on projects across the years.
Murphy's Second Law
Murphy's 2nd law states that nothing is as easy as it looks. That why a Marketing Project Manager must ensure that every member of his team and his customer are fully trained on the tasks they are expected to complete.
Experience Makes Things Look Easy
While everyone on the team needs to be fully trained, nothing beats having highly experienced experts on the team. While training, especially technical training, will teach you how to operate a piece of equipment or software, only experience; long experience, will teach you the shortcuts and what it really takes to make something work. It's sort of like trying to teach a kid how to ride a bicycle. You can provide written instructions about how to do it, but unless and until they actually get on the bicycle, and try and fail, then try and fail until they eventually succeed, will they truly internalize how to ride a bicycle.
Software Development Aspect
Many marketing projects also involve software development. These projects often go over their time budget and are delivered buggy. The difficulty of debugging software is directly proportional to the number of people who will ultimately use it.
Murphy's Eleventh Law
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. If there is a wrong way to do something, a human being will find it. If you want your marketing project to run flawlessly, not only do you need to have and use checklists, where possible, you need to automate how the data they reflect gets acquired.
Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things tends to get worse under pressure. As projects consume their budget, the timeline gets ever more strained. This is the time for the wise project manager to take a step back and assess the situation, come up with a plan, and execute flawlessly. Sometimes, projects can seem like a combat zone, but remember, don't sweat the small stuff, and it is all small stuff.
Ninety-Percent Rule of Project Schedules
The first ninety percent of the task takes ten percent of the time; the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. The easy way to overcome this, at least from a professional project manager's standpoint, is to:
- Setup up your project management technical infrastructure such that everybody is 'in the system', and can receive task assignments via their email client, i.e., Outlook or Gmail. and
- Set some ground rules about when to mark a task as started and when to mark it as completed.
- Good task planning is an art. I like to plan task that are no longer than a day. But usually not less than 2 hours.
Murphy's Law of Selective Gravity
When it comes to bread falling, it will always fall with the buttered side facing down. The marketing project management corollary is that you spot the mistake in that batch of SMS messages you just sent, right after you hit the send button. Always double check your work. Preferably, have someone else double check it as well. Even better, use a template with error checking built in.
Left Alone, Things Go From Bad to Worse
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. For example, you may have spent days, weeks or even years periodically tuning your Google Analytics setup. Your Google Adwords account is fully integrated, via Google Tag Manager (GTM) with Google Analytics. You may even be able to only check the account once a week. But then, out-of-the-blue, Google decides to force everyone to an entirely Google Analytics platform called GA4, which is far less functional than the old one. Things just went from ok, to bad to worse.
Jumping to the Wrong Conclusion
It is said (using Murphy logic) that logic is a systematic method of jumping to the wrong conclusion. That's why it is very important when examining whether a page is working or not, that you learn use objective data to draw your logical conclusions. Remember, Murphy's Law also states that if there is an incorrect way to do something, eventually someone will do it that way.
Impact on SEO
As most marketing projects have some impact on SEO, you should already have an SEO checklist that you use to evaluate each page you publish. These should follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines. You should assume that whoever you put in charge of doing a page-by-page SEO audit will have failed to notice that at least one key page's Page Title, URL and H1 tag do not contain your target keyword. They may or may not have done this consciously.
Great Discoveries are Made by Mistake
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing. Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure. When it comes to uncovering marketing insights, it is often the case that you can discover a lot by looking at Google Search Console.
Human's Can't Really Multi-Task
What they can do is switch from task to the next, really, really fast. Unfortunately, the more they switch back and forth, the less likely they are to get either done on time.
Keeping a Positive Mental Attitude is Never Easy
I once heard that an optimist is a father who lets his teen-age son take the car on a date. A pessimist is a father who will not. A cynic is a father who did. When it comes to keeping everybody on market project in a positive mental state, it helps if the Project Manager is an optimist.
Beautiful Project Plans are Often Only Skin Deep
Folks playing leapfrog must complete all jumps. When it comes to project plans and execution, which often look like a bunch of people who are playing leapfrog with many tasks at once, your plan, which looked correct to start with, probably is going to undergo many, many changes before you launch your baby into the world. That's why you must actively baseline your project plans and update them with the new critical path.
While a shortcut may be the shortest distance between two points, there is really no need to skimp on project planning.
Computers - Make Mistakes
A computer can make as many mistakes in 2 seconds as 20 men working 20 years make. But the computer only does what you tell it to do. To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. That's why the best laid plans of mice of men still go wrong. It's best to run simulations of your project plan, starting from right to left. Have a clear objective in mind, then work backwards from that.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel - Learn From Us
As you can tell, Murphy's Law actually should actually be called Murphy's Laws. That because people are complicated, and projects are among some of the most complicated endeavors we undertake. While it is true that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, we we like to think we have some valuable experience to share to help you overcome the various Murphy's Laws.
Get 7 Key Tips for Successful Marketing Project Management
To help you overcome Murphy’s Law, we have also developed 7 Key Tips for Successful Marketing Project Management, which you can download by clicking the button below.
Until Next Time...
People Who Read This Also Read:
- 10 Critical Chain Project Manager Tips
- How To Use Google Keyword Planner Tool Tutorial
- 8 Secrets to SAP Enabled Spend Performance Management
Please Leave Us a Comment!
We hope you found the various Murphy's Laws we've shared to be interesting and informative. But we want to hear from you! Leave a comment below to let us know if you've experienced any of these laws in your own marketing projects. Did you find the point about how experience makes things look easy to be valuable? Or perhaps you have a different perspective on project management that you'd like to share. We welcome all comments and feedback. Additionally, if there's a topic related to marketing project management that you'd like us to cover in future blogs, please let us know. Your comments are valuable to us and other readers, so don't hesitate to leave one!
