Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DEFINITION
Tending to initiate a change rather than reacting to events
OR
Controlling a situation by causing somethin to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after it happens.
Present Scenario
All of these can put the business at risk unless processes, p monitoring are put in place to handle potential problems.
The solution to the problem lies in using a proactive management style instead of reactive management
Proactive management involves anticipating what can happen and having a plan in place to handle it when it does
It is about controlling a problem instead of running around trying to solve it based on your gut instinct.
It is about monitoring for potential problems so they can be dealt with before they become problems.
Evaluate your key systems and services by looking for potential risks. Think outside of the box for areas that you have not previously identified. Sometimes it is useful to bring someone not directly involved with the assessment team on board to act as a set of fresh eyes. They may see things that have been overlooked.
To be proactive you must develop plans to handle each of the risks. Restoration plans should have step-by-step instructions for staff to follow. System failure plans need all contact information and instructions to restore service. Plans should be step-by-step and continuously improved. Also consider that the person or group who normally handles an area may not be available. Backup personnel should be trained
Look at your recurring problems and incidents. Use incident management and problem management skills to identify the cause and make sure a work around is already in place to handle them. A work around is a temporary fix. To prevent future problems a permanent solution must be found.
Train your staff in proactive management. It should be built into the culture of the organization. Processes should be put into place where incident management and problem management will spot trends in incidents and fix them to prevent future incidents. From upper management to the help desk all staff members must know what their proactive role is.
Monitor your services, systems, projects and every area so that you become aware of potential problems before they can cripple your business. You are monitoring not just for failure, but for trends and performance thresholds being crossed where you can proactively eliminate a risk before it becomes a problem.
Reactive Approach
The reactive approach is to go into fire fighting mode. (i.e. handling emergencies, service interruptions). In fire fighting mode you are reacting to something that was not planned for. You try to get the problem under control and restore services or get back to a normal operating mode as soon as possible. You method for doing this is usually to just wing it based on your knowledge and experience.
Proactive Approach
The proactive approach is to plan for and control situations. Planning involves looking for every potential risk to a system, service or project. By looking for risks before they happen you can use strong problem solving and risk management techniques to create processes and plans to put into place when they occur. When a problem occurs you then have a step-by-step plan for solving it. More importantly with proper monitoring you eliminate the risk before it ever becomes a problem.
Reactive Approach
The reactive approach to planning can be summarized as going with your gut feeling. Here everything is planned out with notes and conversations with others. Overall some solution that worked well two years back is again repeated for the problem at present.
Proactive Approach
The proactive approach is to collect and analyse as much information as possible.
The planning here uses a process based approach to take the data, analyse it and produce a controlled plan of action. This plan is now based on facts and is less likely to run into problems. The plan is also based on the current data for your systems and services which easily deals with current problems The reactive approach does not monitor systems, projects or other areas for potential problems. The philosophy is that proactive management is a waste of time and money. You just deal with a problem when it happens. On other hand in Proactive approach everything is pre-planned and monitored.