Good Management Is Predictive Management Not Reactive Management

Many managers believe that their job is to resolve problems that arise. While that is true, it is only the lesser part of the job. More importantly, a manager's job is to prevent problems.
This is the difference between reactive management, which solves problems as they occur, and predictive management, which tries to prevent many problems from arising in the first place.
Reactive ManagementReactive management deals with problems as they come up.
It is a management style that is much admired for its ability to quickly get the resources back into production, whether those resources are machines or people.

If you are good at reactive management, you are:

-Decisive and able to act quickly,
-Able to find the root cause of events,
-Creative and able to develop many solutions,
-Innovative and able to find new ways to solve problems, and
-Calm and in control in the midst of a "crisis".


Predictive Management

Predictive management focuses on reducing the number of problems that require reactive management. The more problems that can be prevented through predictive management, the fewer problems will need to be solved through reactive management. If you are good at predictive management, you are:

-Thoughtful and analytic,
-Not likely to go chasing after the current panic,
-More aware of the important than the merely urgent issues,
-Able to identify patterns in data and patterns of failures,
-More focused on "why" did something go wrong, rather than "what" can be done to fix it, and
-Able to keep the big picture in mind when working through the details.

Managing Time and Schedule

Time management is a critically important skill for any successful project manager. I have observed that Project Managers who succeed in meeting their project schedule have a good chance of staying within their project budget. The most common cause of blown project budgets is lack of schedule management. Fortunately there is a lot of software on the market today to help you manage your project schedule or timeline. Any project can be broken down into a number of tasks that have to be performed. To prepare the project schedule, the project manager has to figure out what the tasks are, how long they will take, what resources they require, and in what order they should be done. The difficulty in managing a project schedule is that there are seldom enough resources and enough time to complete the tasks sequentially. Therefore, tasks have to be overlapped so several happen at the same time. Project management software (see sidebar) greatly simplifies the task of creating and managing the project schedule by handling the iterations in the schedule logic for you. When all tasks have been listed, resourced, and sequenced, you will see that some tasks have a little flexibility in their required start and finish date. This is called float. Other tasks have no flexibility, zero float. A line through all the tasks with zero float is called the critical path. All tasks on this path, and there can be multiple, parallel paths, must be completed on time if the project is to be completed on time. The Project Manager's key time management task is to manage the critical path.

Managing Costs, Money, and Profits

Often a Project Manager is evaluated on his or her ability to complete a project within budget. If you have effectively managed the project resources and project schedule, this should not be a problem. It is, however, a task that requires the project manager's careful attention. You can only manage effectively a limited number of cost items, so focus on the critical ones Each project task will have a cost, whether it is the cost of the labor hours of a computer programmer or the purchase price of a cubic yard of concrete. In preparing the project budget, each of these costs is estimated and then totaled. Some of these estimates will be more accurate than others. A company knows what it will charge each of its projects for different classifications of labor. Commodities like concrete are priced in a very competitive market so prices are fairly predictable. Other estimates are less accurate. For instance, the cost of a conveyor system with higher performance specifications that normal can be estimated to be more expensive, but it is hard to determine whether it will be 10% more or 15% more. For an expensive item, that can be a significant amount. So a project budget is composed of the estimated cost, plus the contingency and design allowance, plus any profit. The project manager's job is to keep the actual cost at or below the estimated cost, to use as little of the design allowance and contingency as possible, and to maximize the profit the company earns on the project.