CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review | Week 12| Project Management for Marketers.
The typical issues that arise with poor project management fall into three specific categories from my experience. The first is resource issues. Those will come up if you do not have a good process and you do not project manage your work. The second are scope issues. So, missing deadlines, missing timelines, that sort of thing. And the third is attribution, not knowing exactly what your metrics are, your targets, or how to achieve your goals. And so, if we were to think about resource problems that come from poor project management, that ultimately means, A, people, sometimes if you improperly resource a project, you do not have enough people on the project, you don't have people that have enough free time in order to work on the project, or people start to feel stretched, so that could be really bad for your success in building your marketing campaign.
The other resource issue that can arise here is the idea of improperly resourcing time. So, either rushing into a project assuming that you will be able to finish it in a certain amount of time, or just creating too much context switching, so, for people to be able to process and actually really think about what they need to get done in order to achieve their goals and targets for that campaign. And then finally, output in terms of resourcing is a really big one.
Essentially what happens is that when you improperly resource your project, your output will usually be cut short, or it could become too big, and your overarching goal of what you set out to achieve just gets way out of scope which then leads to, again, this next issue of scope. Scoping and resourcing are really well linked to each other, but when it comes to scope issues that can come up with poor project management, one of the main ones is over-commitment and under-commitment. So, ultimately, you will over-commit on just promising the world and achieving as much as possible in order to create the most winning marketing campaign you can think of, or you will under-commit and you will just, you know, not create the best resources or the right content, or the ideal amount of emails to convert your customers. So, that can be a huge issue that comes up with scoping, and that is the fault of not having great project managed process overall and then finally, the biggest one that I have experienced, and I am sure a lot of you have, is this idea of scope creep. So that is when something just never ends, and ultimately you do not have a good sense of where you are on your project timeline and so therefore, things just keep going, and never end.
Nobody is perfect, but that can be a huge issue that comes up with poor project management, and, or no project management overall. And then finally, the other biggest issue that comes up with lack of project management is this idea of attribution. So, vague goals or not really knowing how to track your performance and your metrics. These are the things that motivate marketers in order to achieve what they set out to in order to convert customers, get those leads, win those sales, and so if you cannot properly attribute what you are doing and know what the end result is, that can create some pretty bad juju for your project management and for your campaign. Another big issue with attribution is this idea of not having actionable learnings. If you are not hitting the right targets that are set towards achieving your goal, then how will you ever learn, how will you ever be able to improve what you have done in order to get better in the future.
It ultimately is up to a project manager for a marketing campaign to coordinate the right people, the right priority, and the right processes in order to ship winning marketing campaigns that get you more sales leads and sign ups. They do this but they also do it with a strong caveat that they arrange them in a way to achieve only one single objective. And that is something I really want to hammer home here.
It is really important when setting your objectives for campaigns that you really just pick one. This can be really tricky. In this book here, which is a quote from "Good Strategy, Bad Stratey," by Richard Rumelt, when you, as a project manager, what you often do is you have to make the tough choices between what your objectives are for that particular campaign and for that particular goal that you are set out on your marketing team. And why it is difficult is because it actually slights another potential outcome, another potential objective that you could be going after.
How many times have you been in a scenario where you have had someone ask you or where you have thought yourself of what you want to set out to achieve and you could write down, I want leads, I want sales, I want sign-ups. Well, in fact, when it comes to project management, you have to pick one single objective and slight the others in order to make sure that your campaign is the most effective it could possibly be. And so, a good example of this is from Richard Rumelt's novel and essentially, what he talks about is this idea of setting one objective, setting a good strategy, and he shares a case study from this woman who owns a grocery store. Basically, she owns a grocery store, and it is really close to a university campus. But it is also on a stop that is on route for a lot of young professionals who are on their way to work. Therefore, at her grocery store, she has these students, and so therefore, she often thinks, I should probably target these students more by snacks that they would love, by their favorite study meals and work to