Actions are the means or specific activities, planned to achieve the objectives. A course of action intended to result in a 12 percent return might be to engage in a product development effort aimed at introducing five new products in the two –year period. Establishing objectives and choosing courses of action also require forecasting the future. A manager cannot plan without giving consideration to future events and factors that could affect what will be possible to accomplish
Resources are constraints on the course of action. For example; “ the cost to be incurred in the development of five new products must not exceed $10 million.” A plan should specify the kinds and amounts of resources required, as well as the potential sources and allocation of those resources. Specifying resources constraints also involves budgeting- identifying the sources and levels of resources that can be committed to the course of action.
Finally, a plan must include ways and means to implement the intended actions. Implementation involves the assignment and direction of personnel to carry out the plan.
Organizing: the structure of an organization consists of relatively fixed and stable relationships among jobs and groups of jobs. The primary purpose of organization structure is to influence the behavior of individuals and groups so as to achieve effective performance.
Organizational structures differ as a consequence of management decisions. In order to measure these differences, it is necessary to identify measurable attributes, or dimensions, of structure. Three often- used dimensions are complexity, centralization, and formalization. Complexity refers to the extent to which the jobs in the organization are relatively specialized; centralization refers to the extent to which authority is retained in the jobs of top management; and formalization refers to the extent to which policies, rules, and procedures exist in written form.
Four key managerial decisions determine organization structures; these decisions are dividing work, delegating authority, departmentalizing jobs into groups, and determining spans of control. The four key decisions are interrelated and interdependent, although each has certain specific problem that can be considered apart from the others.
Dividing the overall task into smaller, related tasks or jobs depends initially on the technical and economic advantage of specialization of labor. Delegating authority enables an individual to make decision and to exact obedience without approval by higher management. Similar to other organizing issues, delegated authority is a relative, not absolute, concept. All individuals, whether managers or nonmanagers in an organization have some authority. The question is whether they have enough to do their jobs. The grouping of jobs into departments requires the selection of common bases such as function, process, product, customer and geography. Each basis has advantages and disadvantages that must be evaluated in terms of overall effectiveness. The matrix form of organizations provides some opportunities to realize the advantages of function and product as bases for departments in combination. The principle disadvantage is the creation of dual reporting channels for members of product departments and groups. The optimal span of control is no one specific number of subordinates. Although the number of potential relationships increases geometrically as the number subordinates increases arithmetically, the important consideration is the frequency and intensity of the actual relationships. The current practice of downsizing has important implications for the spans of control of managers in organizations that downsize. As a consequence of the reduced number of mangers in organizations relative to non-managers, the average spans of control will necessarily increase.
Leading: the third managerial function is leading. Some people consider leading to be the most important and most challenging of all-managerial activities. Leading is the set of processes used to get people to work together to advance the interests of the organization for example, most experts credit Herb Kelleher ‘s leadership abilities as possibly the ingredient most important to his success at southwest. His employees actually want to work for him and strive to help him fulfill his vision for the firm. Leading involves a number of different processes and activities. The starting point is understanding basic individual and interpersonal processes, motivating employees and leader’s efforts to influence others and communication.
Controlling: the final phase of the management process is controlling, or monitoring the organization’s progress toward its goals. As the organization moves toward its goals, mangers must monitor progress to ensure that it is performing in such a way as to arrive at its “destination’” at the appointed time. Controlling helps ensure the effectiveness of and efficiency needed for successful management. The basic elements of the control process are establishing standards, measure performance, compare performance against standards, consider corrective action.
Hot Harley’s in Hog Heaven
Harley-Davidson’s motorcycles have always been loud, fast and gaudy. The firm dominated the world market for large motorcycles for years. Japanese competitors began to make inroads into Harley’s more stable markets, however, and by the late 1970’s the firm’s parent, AMF, ordered management to boost output threefold. Unfortunately, without good management, this caused product quality to erode drastically, and Harley’s sales soon plummeted.
In the early 1980s, Harley nearly went bankrupt. Federal tariffs were put in place to help Harley meet foreign competition, but they were set to last only until 1988. In 1987, Harley asked that the tariffs be removed. In considerably less than a decade, Harley had changed so much that the tariffs were no longer needed. Changing the organization to respond to changing conditions in markets, technology, and the like is now seen as a critical management characteristic. Harley ‘s experience exemplifies the importance of such change.
Richard F. Treelike, president and CEO of the Milwaukee-based Motorcycle Company, deserves a lot of credit for the changes at Harley. A realist with a strong personality, he had his manager’s look to see what was wrong and fix it. Inventory systems were systems were streamlined so that parts arrived just when they were needed. This reduces the numbers of parts in inventory and, hence, the cost of warehousing. The new manufacturing technology with integrated development processes run by computers was installed. For all of this to work, managers and workers had to learn new skills and develop different attitudes toward work, a process made easier by the threat of financial collapse and job losses.
Indeed by 1993 Harley had a new problem. It could not maintain its high quality and increase production fast enough to meet demand. Rather than lower quality to increase production rates. Harley moved to gradually increase production while using a variety of other devices to keep customers waiting for Harley rather than switching to competitive products.
Harley recently began to produce branded merchandise – black leather jackets, shot glasses – that would be available only through dealers. Many Harley dealers also began to develop show rooms with antique to lure potential customers and to ensure that those who wanted to place orders were willing to wait. These changes worked. Harley continues to ride high on its efforts but is determined not to become complacent or to lose sight of what has enabled its turnaround – focusing on changing the organization to meet the needs of customers in the changing global environment of management.
From the previous example it appears that managers used a variety of management functions to change their firm to improve its competitiveness in a changing marketplace. Some of the tools the manager used for achieving that is as follows:
Just in time: While handling the crisis of the company the manager utilized the JIT approach in order to reduce the cost of the warehousing.
Quality of work life: is the overall quality of human experiences in thee workplace, and that’s exactly what was the manager aiming to and really did. He encouraged the employees to learn new skills and develops different attitudes toward work.
While applying new manufacturing technology with integrated computer system, might allow the manager to directly reach the employees through networking.
Another example about the management process
For every organization there should be a clear and direct mission for every person within the organization. How can the organization reach its mission and achieve it successfully? Is this the role of the management mainly and in turn the employees. First there should be a plan of what should be accomplished in the future. While this plan should be simplified to a set of objectives. Say for a certain university is to become one of the best universities in the country or even reach the global market. To achieve this mission we should set a clear plan. This plan contain a set of objectives that have been settled according to the study the university made about the market and the forecasted elements in the future environment. So if we found that our market share is 20%. One of the objectives might be to increase our market share to 40% within one year so if the future is promising for the private university specially for the universities that offer a universal education system while possessing the most selected and experienced academic staff. With the support of the government we would find that we have a great opportunity that we should benefit from. So how can we achieve this objective? We should have a course of actions that help us in achieving our objective. One of the actions the university should take is to reach the target market while facing a severe competition from the other universities so should hire an experienced marketer to do so. Another point we should take into consideration is our resources, is our financial, human, physical resources enough to absorb such target. Of course while setting these objectives it should be shared with the academic, administrating, marketing and financing staff. Then we move to the organizing step. Here we should assign the job responsibilities for each department and intern to each employee with in each department. For the academic staff they should with the best educational, personal and qualification levels. While the admission and marketing staff should possess well communications skills to deal with different people with different aspects and attitudes. Also another way of achieving the objective is to facilitate the admission procedures and time and to utilize the available resources efficiently. That seeks the existence or permanent control over the transactions and continuos feedback and evaluation to monitor how far the organization is achieving its objectives. This can be done through daily report about the admission status, which is done by the staff supervisor to the higher levels of management. While evaluating the performance of the staff any deviation from the planned objectives with in each department can easily be traced and a suitable corrective action take place. In addition to weekly meeting with the staff member to discuss any new ideas or problems faced the staff during their work and how they can overcome these problem within the available resources. these course of actions are supported by motivating and stimulating techniques to encourage the staff whether it is tangible ones(bonuses or allowances) or intangible (selecting a course to attend within the university the employee interested in).
