4 Functions Of Management

The management process contains four basic functions; planning, organizing, leading and controlling. By using these key tools, one can create an organization as a whole consisting of unified parts acting in harmony to achieve goals, both successfully and proficiently. It is vital for an organization manager to implement these functions to ensure the success of the company. The functions of management are described, according to (Bateman, Snell, 2004) as follows: Planning is specifying the goals to be achieved and deciding in advance the appropriate actions needed to achieve those goals. Planning activities include analyzing current situations, anticipating the future, determining objectives, deciding in what types of activities the company will engage, choosing corporate and business strategies, and determining the resources needed to achieve the organization's goals. Plans set the stage for action and for major achievements. Organizing is assembling and coordinating the human, financial, physical, informational, and other resources needed to achieve goals. Organizing activities include attracting people to the organization, specifying job responsibilities, grouping jobs into work units, marshaling and allocating resources, and creating conditions so that people and things work together to achieve maximum success. Leading is stimulating people to be high performers. It is directing, motivating, and communicating with employees, individually and in groups. Leading involves close day-to-day contact with people, helping to guide and inspire them toward achieving team and organizational goals. Leading takes place in teams, departments, and divisions, as well as at the tops of large organizations. Controlling monitors progress and implements necessary changes. When managers implement their plans, they often find that things are not working out as planned. The controlling function makes sure that goals are met. It asks and answers the question, "Are our actual outcomes consistent with our goals?" It makes adjustments as needed.

These four functions of management apply to my organization, my immediate supervisor, and finally, my position. I work in the IT department of a financial institution. I'm going to discuss how one project we have coming up involves the four functions of management. We are relocating our internet banking call staff to a different location outside of New York City. There are 50 workstations and 7 printers that need to be configured and ready to go by October 28.

The role of planning in this project is very important. We have to address a few straightforward questions:

(1) What do we want to do? We want to relocate a department to different location outside the city.

(2) Where are we in relation to our goal? We are currently in the process of configuring all the new workstations and printers that will be installed in the new building.

(3) Which factors will help or delay us in reaching our goal? A few factors that will help us are the fact that new equipment was ordered so that we won't have any down time for the users. This is a 24hr a day on call department. If we didn't order new equipment then the down time would be a big problem. Reconfiguring a workstation could take anywhere from 1-3hrs. With 50 workstations and a staff of 4, the users would be down for a great deal of time. Since new equipment was order we had time in the weeks before to configure and get everything ready. We have to be prepared for something to go wrong. There is always something going wrong in this type of move. The one thing that can delay us is the fact that connections to the network could be down for certain users, users might not be able to print due to some software/driver issue, and worse of all the telephone lines or network lines to the bank's system might not be ready for the rollout.

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