Harvard ManageMentor In Brief on Project Management
Be proactive, not reactive. If there is a single guideline for being a successful project manager, that's it. Your career, and those of others, may hinge on how well you follow this guideline. Projects, after all, are a key means by which organizations reach their strategic goals. If your projects do not meet their objectives on schedule and on budget, you can expect to be called to account for that failure.
You may protest that the blame does not rest with you! Perhaps you lost a key resource, or an overseas competitor blindsided you with the launch of a competing product, or a major storm shut down the city. Your list of reasons may be long, and some may be entirely valid.
But the finger of blame will remain pointed at you because you are the project manager. It is your responsibility to figure out how to succeed in spite of the hurdles in your path. And your responsibility to know how you are going to get over those hurdles and still make it to the finish line on time — and on budget.
Think about what happens when you are constantly in reactive mode. You run from one meeting to the next, dealing with the latest crisis. Tempers run high as schedules slip, team members argue, and executives demand an accounting. Caught in the middle, you may not be entirely clear how the project derailed. This is a picture of a project run amok.
You can change this picture by taking time to think and plan. As a proactive manager, plan for the unexpected and then put contingency plans in motion as needed. Let's look at several of the many tried and true approaches to proactively managing a project.
Five proactive steps you can take include:
1. Choose tradeoffs carefully
2. Document what you are doing
3. Define the critical path
4. Build in quality control, and
reactive和proactive的区别
5. Incorporate learning as you go
The first of these steps is choosing tradeoffs. Every project has three competing demands: quality, time, and cost. Think of these three competing demands as variables in an equation. Quality = time + cost. A change in one variable causes changes in the others. As the adage goes, "Good, cheap, fast — choose two!"
What happens if you want higher quality? You'll need more time and more money. What happens if you need to finish in half the time? Quality slips and costs go up as you staff up to meet the new deadline.
Projects always have time and cost constraints. Tradeoffs are inevitable. The art of project management is in deciding when and how to make those tradeoffs. And then communicating those tradeoffs to everyone involved.
To talk productively about tradeoffs, define a starting value for each of the project variables: quality, time, and cost. How can you talk meaningfully about a change order or a schedule
slippage if those involved haven't agreed on what the deliverables and milestones are to begin with?
Documenting a project plan prepares you to handle the changes that will inevitably occur. That's why documentation is the second proactive step in managing a project. To begin with, carefully describe the quality, time, and cost variables in a project plan. Taking this step ensures that the team, customers, and all stakeholders have the same expectations at the project kickoff.
Many projects fail because the team overlooked a significant part of the work or grossly underestimated the time and money involved. To avoid that trap, work with your team to divide complex tasks into smaller tasks. Ask, "What has to be done to accomplish this task?" Continue to ask this question, breaking tasks into subtasks — until you cannot subdivide a task further.
Your project plan will prove invaluable when you are faced with scope creep. A project sponsor or customer wants more — higher quality, for example, or an additional feature. Yo
u cannot increase quality without increasing the time and money required. Yet invariably the request is: Do more — but with the same resources, in the same time.
Scope creep can be a death knell for a project unless you proactively manage changes. Make the tradeoffs crystal clear to the project sponsors or customer. If you want X, it will cost you Y. Refer back, as necessary, to the deliverables defined in your project plan.
A proactive manager meticulously documents decisions, assignments, and action items throughout a project. How many times have you heard team members say, "That's not what I remember" or "I thought someone else was doing that"? To prevent such problems, keep a record of project decisions and action items that is accessible to all team members. Put due dates on action items, and assign responsibility for each and every action.
A third proactive step is to deeply understand your project's critical path. The critical path is the longest sequence of all tasks through the project. This sequence determines the project's duration because you must complete the steps on the critical path in order.
Project managers illustrate their critical paths on diagrams and charts. If you are proactive, however, you study the critical path to the point of internalizing it. Then, if an event occurs that could affect that critical path, warning bells go off in your head. It may take time to determine what to do. But you will not be blindsided when a task on the critical path is held up because a requirement for that task was not completed.

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