Management Control System

Skills Consulting & Training Company, providing tailored made programs in several areas in business, management, finance, account, and we are the only training group deliver a maritime courses in Kuwait. Our mission is to be number one in Kuwait in providing maritime and management courses.

Skills Company is small company and part of big group, in this company, there are two small departments managed by the general manager. As below:

From the above diagram, we can see the company have small number of staff and missing some important departments. This is affect the work in positive way because of Free flow of information between staff , it is easy for us to contact each other any time, any where , visit and set with the manager any time to get quick approval or disapproval or to discuss any issue related to work.. The management style is decentralized; employee input is valuable and ideas taken seriously. Ideas generation and basic change is originating from the bottom to the top. Nevertheless, there are some difficulties because of un specify the type of organization, every one doing every thing in the company started from paper work to marketing and end with supervision, no clear rules or guidelines we have to follow, also no employee manual show the staff what they suppose to do ( job description ) . Of course this will affect the company performance in negative way because there are no clear duties assigned to the company staff, the work implementation will be slow, it will be difficult to manage the quality of performance because every one responsible for every thing and hard to follow every person.

On the other hand, I try to discuss with my manager (Mr. Ahmed) about the other difficulties that we face. He said the main problem we face is the budget! Every year the board approved the main yearly budget, but in the same time, we need another budget for the projects we want to do or any other courses we would like to provide for corporate. These kinds of courses need a huge budget because of registration, preparation, insurance and other important requirement. If we going to ask the board for another budget regarding the project usually the final approval take, long time and sometimes we are losing

the project or the program. In addition, another problem we face is the strong competitors in the market; we are working in close environment with out any marketing or advertisement activities, and this will affect the company performance and income.

From the above problems, we can understand how these problems are affecting the management control system because we are missing most of the important elements for successful control. In my opinion the most things we need is the advance planning. Plan how to design the organization, and budget.

The following list I suggested to improve the management control system in Skills Company:

- Skills Company should design new structure type related to their work and activities, and I suggest two types of structures: Functional structure and Project structure.

Functional structure, which is a part of the matrix management. Some of its advantages are structure is tied to key activities within the business, enhances operating efficiency where tasks are routine and repetitive and preserves centralized control of strategic results. In using this structure, the company will have specific departments to do specific jobs according to their duties. Especially, the company needs the marketing department to improve the sales and designing effective marketing plan for more profit. The chart below shows my suggestion.

While Project structure, which is part of functional