Murphy’s Law: The Key to Successful Task Management

The essential contingency plan every project manager needs

Invented by Captain Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr., an American aerospace engineer born in 1918, Murphy’s Law states that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.

The law was born after Captain Edward was working on a project called Air Force Project MX981 which was designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person could stand in the event of a crash. Upon finding a wiring fault with a transducer mid-project, Captain Edward held the technician responsible by proclaiming “if there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.” Afterwards, the project manager added this to a list of “laws” he happened to keep and named it “Murphy’s Law”.

Not long after this incident, the Air Force doctor gave a press conference saying that their impressive safety record on the project was due to their belief in Murphy’s Law and the importance of circumventing it. This was picked up by aerospace manufacturers and quoted in many ads, newspapers, and magazines over the next few months. And so, Murphy’s Law became common knowledge.

Given the natures of Murphy’s Law, you may feel that it’s a pretty negative way of thinking, but that’s not always the case. It can be incredibly helpful to use Murphy’s Law in your project/task planning and management in order to predict and navigate any potential problems that may arise.

Setting Realistic Deadlines

You can benefit from Murphy’s law when creating a Project or to-do list by overestimating the time that each task will take to complete. This law is based on forward thinking principles and the importance of having a contingency plan in place to deal with any setbacks that you encounter. For example, the design project you think will take a week may take 2–3 weeks if everything doesn’t go to plan. So, using Murphy’s Law, you plan for the worst case scenario and give yourself those 3 weeks. Therefore taking pressure off yourself to put a rush on it if it takes longer than expected.

For individual tasks on your to-do list, it often helps to add an extra 20% contingency on to the estimated time you think they’ll take to complete. You can do this in Buckets by setting these due dates/estimated deadlines to both your Projects and the individual tasks contained in Checklists within those Projects.

The Checklist Back-up

According to the gist of Murphy’s Law; if you think everything has gone to plan… it probably hasn’t. Now, this isn’t always true but it’s something that can easily be managed by having a Checklist in place to double-check that all of your tasks have been completed properly and on time.

It’s easy to become complacent when everything is going according to plan, but these are usually the times when unexpected issues pop up to catch us out. By creating detailed Checklists, you can ensure that you haven’t overlooked a single thing that’s essential to the completion of the Project. The use of a maintenance Checklist that lists potential scenarios that could arise is also a good idea. It’s much easier to deal with a problem that occurs in the Project if you already accounted for it in the first place.

Developing a thorough Checklist that you can follow during the task or Project will ensure that nothing slips through the net and decrease the chances of any potential setbacks.

Being Armed With A Response

Instead of hoping for the best with a Project, Murphy’s Law requires you to look at the very worst that could happen. You need to ask yourself questions such as:

• What problems could occur and how?
• What variations of these problems are possible?
• How can I respond to each?
• How will it affect my ability to complete the project and my belief in its success?

Once you’ve done this assessment, it’s time to figure out how you’ll respond to the scenarios that may occur. If you’re in charge of a team, they need to be involved too by running test drills for each potential problem. This type of Project testing can be done in Buckets by creating mock Projects to manage the process.

Team feedback and a follow-up discussion is essential in determining just how effective your response is and how you can improve it. This will build both your confidence as a project manager and the confidence of your team, as you will be prepared and skilled to respond to every eventuality!

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