Functions of Management

Functions of Management

In most organizations, the key to managing and utilizing all of your employees to

work as a team, is proper management. But in today's professional world, some of the

most basic management skills are lost in the shuffle. In this paper, I will define the four

functions of management and show how they apply to my personal workplace.

There are four key principles or functions of management. The first is planning, and by

definition, planning is: A scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the

accomplishment of an objective (Google 2005). When you are in a position that

oversees employees, you must systematically plan your goals and or actions. By doing

this, you will have a "plan of attack " which will ease the amount of time and energy you

will spend combining all of your team's thoughts and ideas to accomplish your goal. In

my case, I have about 300 employee's that require daily computer maintaince or upgrades

and even equipment orders and builds. I need to have a set aside plan of rules and regs

and timeframes to complete what , I have to accomplish to make my customer happy, and

give them the ability to perform much more effective. Proper planning requires research

and time, a thought out process of events that includes a timeframe and what recourses

will be needed to accomplish your goal. In one particular project that, I am involved with

is a migration from a Novell based network to a Microsoft Active Directory network.

This is a project that has had extensive planning to create the best possible timeframe and

Create the best possible environment for the end user. By doing this we will make the

transition very smooth, with little or no intervention by our network team.

Then next key function of management is organizing. Organizing by definition is:

to arrange in a coherent form; systematize. (dictionary.com 2005) In layman's terms,

organizing is putting together ideas and actions in one united front. All employees both

private and professional have many levels of organizing and organization. Most have

chain of commands and different individuals handle different things, but the key is

that all can come together and systematically plan and put the plan into action On the

individual level employees need to have a system to govern how they will run their day

to day operations, and this system needs to be personalized to their liking for it to work.

Learning begins with observation, with seeing what has occurred. An assessment or

diagnosis is made about what one has observed - one develops a theory about what is

going on. This theory influences the development of a answer, which leads to the

implementation of actions. My position, allow me to organize myself and my customers.

I need to keep detail data concerning the rate and use of equipment, and how the

equipment is being handled. I also am required to document all changes in the process,

keep both paper and electronic records of the equipment given and the specifications of

each unit. Also because of the scandals in both Adelphia and Enron, the U.S. government

has concluded that all utility company must be audited on a quarterly basis, to ensure that

those types of mis-conducts will not happen again.

Without organization there is chaos. Companies will have many people in positions sole

to organize and execute projects and place resources were they are needed for not only

management but on other sides of the business as well.

The next two functions of management, have more similarities , than differences.

leading or leadership by definition is: the guidance of others to achieve a common goal.

An effective leader resembles an orchestra conductor in some ways. He/she has to

somehow get a group of potentially diverse and talented people many