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MANAGEMENT

All organizations, whether small or large or large, have to be managed.

Management means the planning, controlling, directing and coordinating of various ideas, activities and programmes in order to achieve a stated objective.

This means that there is a need for people with special abilities and skills.

The main responsibility of the senior managers of any business is decision-making. These decisions are connected with planning, organizing, directing and controlling the work to be done.

Planning has to be undertaken at all levels of management. An organization without proper plans is like a ship without a rudder.

Managers have to decide what to produce, how it should be produced, and for whom. This is at the centre of the planning process. The operation also involves:

1. estimating what resources will be needed,

2. considering what problems are likely to arise,

3. deciding how these can best be overcome.

Long-term plans

Plans may be long-term or short-term, depending upon the time period they are designed to cover. How long a period the ‘long-term’ plans should cover depends very much on the type of business organization concerned and the nature of its objectives. In some (such as small retail shops), it may be as little as a year or even less; in others (such as oil exploration enterprises) it may be as long as twenty or thirty years.

Long-term plans are mainly concerned with the main broad objectives which a business or a department hopes ultimately to achieve. These plans take the form of either strategic or tactical plans.

Strategic plans are concerned with what objectives an organization should try to achieve. They are primarily the responsibility of top management.

Tactical plans deal with how they should be achieved. They are prepared in much more detail and usually the responsibility of senior management.

Short-term plans

These are concerned with the specific activities necessary to achieve the long-term aims. They are usually ‘operational’ plans prepared by departmental managers and senior supervisors. They set out in detail, for each department, the working plans for the immediate future.

The ultimate responsibility of management is to direct. This means making decisions and issuing the necessary commands through the management structure.

If the directions issued by management are to be effective, there must be a proper communication system within the organization since, obviously, the orders must reach those who are to carry them out. It is equally important that should be an effective ‘reporting back’ system – communication is a two-way issue.

Decision-making is a characteristic of management at all levels. The more important the matter is, the higher up the management ladder the decision is made. In large organizations – particularly in the public sector – it is often difficult to identify exactly where decisions are made. The point at which they are apparently made is often different from the point at which they are actually made.

Organisation and personnel charts

A business is usually divided into a number of departments, each being responsible for a specific range of work (such as production, finance, personnel, marketing). The structure of the departments and sub-departments can be shown in an organisation chart. This shows the departments how they are related to each other, and the lines of communication between them.

Organisation charts differ from personnel charts. These show the posts held by individuals, their job titles and, sometimes, the span of control. The charts, therefore, indicate how responsibilities are divided between different individuals, and who is responsible to whom.

Despite their advantages, the charts have three serious limitations.

The amount of work involved in running a large business is usually too much for the senior managers to cope with on their own. This means that responsibilities, authority and duties have to be passed ‘down the line’ to others – i.e. to middle middle management and first-line management. This is known as delegation. One of the arts of management is to know to whom particular tasks can be delegated – and to whom they should not.

Proper delegation means the spreading of the work load. It also means that particular tasks can be delegated to those who have special experience or qualifications to deal with them. However, there is always the risk that the person a task is delegated to will prove to be incompetent. There is also the risk that unless there is proper ‘reporting back’, the senior manager will not know what is going on.

Plans are pointless unless there is a periodic check – a control – on what is being achieved. Whereas planning is concerned with the future, control is concerned with the (immediate) past. Problems can arise at any point during the implementation of a plan. Furthermore, unless a specific check is made on them, they can go unnoticed for so long that they become impossible to remedy. The controls should therefore be carefully planned so that they spot-light the problems which are likely to arise. Also, they should take place regularly.

There are several different types of control. Some can be measured in specific ‘quantity’ terms. With these, an actual figure proposed in the plan (often known as the budgeted or standard figure) can be compared with the figure actually achieved. For example, the planned quantity of raw material expected to be used, together with its anticipated cost, can be compared with the actual quantity used and the actual cost. Similarly, the ‘standard’ (i.e. anticipated) wage rates and the time a job is expected to take can be compared with the actual.

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