Management

The Four Functions of Management

The job of every manager involves what is known as the functions of management: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. These functions are goal-directed, interrelated and interdependent. Planning involves devising a systematic process for attaining the goals of the organization. It prepares the organization for the future. Organizing involves arranging the necessary resources to carry out the plan. It is the process of creating structure, establishing relationships, and allocating resources to accomplish the goals of the organization. Directing involves the guiding, leading, and overseeing of employees to achieve organizational goals. Controlling involves verifying that actual performance matches the plan. If performance results do not match the plan, corrective action is taken. Great job defining the functions. Your intro should also let the reader know what aspects of these functions you will be addressing in your paper.

I've been doing contract work for Microsoft for quite some time now. Over the past few years I've been a worker, leader, and mostly a team player. The thing I like mostly is how the managers can create and maintain an internal environment, commonly called the organization, so that others can work efficiently in it. Most of my manager's job duties consist of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the resources of Microsoft. These resources include people, jobs or positions, technology, facilities and equipment, materials and supplies, information, and money. The managers at Microsoft work in a dynamic environment and must anticipate and adapt to challenges.

One of the most common sets of activities on our management team is planning. To put it simply, planning is the most important part for setting the direction for our future projects -- some system -- and then guiding the system to follow the direction. There are many kinds of planning in organizations that evolve around Microsoft. Common to these many kinds of planning are various phases of planning and guidelines for us to carrying them out as effectively as possible. The following process is customized by planners to the meet the needs and nature of the planners and their organizations. What we plan on our testing team is critical, we over emphasize the over all objective. Some are specific accomplishments that we must accomplish in total, or in some combination, to achieve the goals in the plan. Our objectives are usually "milestones" along the way when we are implementing goal setting.

Organizing can be viewed as the activities to collect and configure resources in order to implement plans in a highly effective and efficient fashion. Organizing is a broad set of activities, and often considered one of the major functions of management. Therefore, there are a wide variety of topics in organizing. One of the major types of organizing at Microsoft is that in our business we let the workers somewhat decide for themselves how much they want to organize...well themselves. It is in this function that managers distribute authority to job holders. What I mean is there is really no one looking over your shoulder all of the time to keep you organized. I think as a whole our teams looks out for one another as a whole redundant. It's like using common sense and the rest of the team depends on that from one another.

Directing is influencing people's behavior through motivation, communication, group dynamics, leadership, and discipline. The purpose of directing is to channel the behavior of all personnel to accomplish the organization's mission and objectives while simultaneously helping them accomplish their own career objectives. As a contractor, I have to answer to a Human Resource manager. He is the one that influences my behavior by motivating me to exceed in my career. How does he motivate you? I don't answer Microsoft's full time managers; they have to communicate with my human resource manager (contract manager), who then in turn relates any message, whether it be discipline action, motivation, or most importantly, communication. My resource manager is pretty much the one who is channeling the behavior of all assigned contractors (Excell Data Communications) to accomplish Microsoft's mission objectives, while