Sign In Sign-Up

Welcome!

Close

Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...

Yes, Please make this my home page!

No Thanks

  Don't show this to me again.

Close

Q.1 Discuss whether you need any control when every thing going as planned. Design a control system for controlling the performance of your own subordinates, keeping in view the characteristics of effective controls. Examine the control methods and strategies used in your organisation or any organisation you are familiar with. Briefly describe the organisation you are referring to.

Answer. Control is required even if everything is going as per plan. This is so, because current performance is no guarantee of future performance as well. The control system, if designed appropriately, will also work as an early warning system so that when results start to deviate from plan, there can be an early detection of the same and hence corrective action may be taken before the problem becomes too severe. For example, if a company breaks up the sales target into weekly target, then deviations from the target may be detected in a couple of weeks rather than a couple of months or a quarter and so the organization can take remedial measures earlier and restrict the extent of damage. If the detection is timely, the organization may, through extra efforts even recover the deficit. Hence control is needed even at the best of times. Further, today's business environment is a rapidly changing scenario. The basic assumptions and premise, themselves, on which business plans are chalked out tend to undergo a rapid rate of obsoletion, thus rendering the plans themselves ineffective. In this sort of situation, the organization has to create a feedback and feedforward situation where the organizational control systems are designed in a manner to help the organization deal with change in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner. One such control mechanism is the Balanced scorecard. Conventional organizational performance measures seek to evaluate the achievement in monetary terms, i.e., mainly in terms of sales, profits and certain profitability measures. This method deployed by Prof. Robert kaplan creates a four-prolonged evaluation scorecard for measuring corporate performance. It tries to emphasize the important qualitative parameters of an organization's performance as well and quantify them to help achieve a certain degree of objectivity in their measurement. The four components of this scorecard are:

• Profitability: This component tells the management about the past performance, and only forms the base of the decision making for the future plans. This is measured using various measures such as the total sales and profits, sales and profit growth, return on investments, etc.
• Customer Focus: This is used to understand the standing of the organization with its customers and the satisfaction of the customer needs by the organization. It is measured using parameters like customer satisfaction index (CSI), the data for which is gathered by surveys, number of complaints per thousand products and general customer feedback. Also, data such as percentage market share and change in market share are also used to measure the customer's response to the organization.
• Process Improvement: This is used to gauge the success potential of the organization in the long term. This measure focuses on the internal processes of the organization and is not concerned with external measurement results. The commonly used parameters to evaluate process improvement are cycle time reduction, yield of output which indicates the efficiency of utilization of raw material, percentage of outgoing defects, which is a number that immediately concerns the customer. It also measures the cost efficiency of production and tries to quantify improved productivity of the manpower. It even measures employee turnover and number of days training provided on an average per employee.
• Innovation: This measure gauges the success potential of the organization in the short term. Though this measure is conceptually sound, it may lead to cannibalization of the existing products/services introduced during the year, what is the percentage of sales generated through new products, the profitability of these products, the time taken to bring these products to market etc. These basically measure are favourable, it indicates the potential of the organization to stay with the market at least in the near medium term future.

These measurements not only evaluate the organization's current position and potential but also motivate the employees to concentrate on these activities because it is well known that "What gets measured matters, what matters leads to relevant actions taken get the results which are eventually measured." So this system acts as feedforward mechanism to direct the efforts of the people.

There are three basic steps involved in designing a control process.

1) Establishment of standards: Controls are established on the basis of plans and so the first step is to have clear plans, which in turn become the standards for controlling. The sales forecast plans which sets sales target itself become the standard against which actual sale is measures. However, an effective control process focuses only on the critical variables rather than controlling all the variables. It also indicates the permissible range of deviation from the expected target. Only when the actual performance is outside this range, does it become a matter of concern for the manager to find out why this has happened and take corrective action. Similarly, the marketing manager at the head office is interested in the sales figures achieved by each branch and not in the performance of individual salesman.

ii) Measurement of performance: Having set standards it is necessary to devise a system for measuring the performance of individuals, department or the company against these standards. In some cases quantitative goals can be set, such as number of units to be sold by each salesman, number of units to be produced per machine, or the profit to be generated by each branch office.

However, evaluating performance in case of managers at the top level or those operating in areas such as personnel, public relations, and administration is far more difficult. The work output cannot be translated into quantifiable terms. Only a qualitative appraisal is possible

iii) Corrective deviations: The ultimate objective of the control process is to pinpoint the occurrence outside the permissible range of action to allow management to take corrective action. The maximum number of rejects per machine per day is fixed. When the number of rejects increases beyond this acceptable level, it is time for the production supervisor to investigate and take suitable steps to correct the situation.

The successful control process on the all-important concepts of feedback. This refers to the information on the critical control variable of the operation or activity which when fed back to the manager triggers off corrective action.

Except in a self-regulated, closed mechanical system here the corrective action is taken and automatically, most activities within an organization require human intervention. In few cases only a little bit corrective action is needed. But sometimes the situation requires drastic action even scrapping a department of plant whose operation is became totally unprofitable. All control processes should reflect the plans that they are supposed to follow. However, to be truly effective the control must highlight the critical variables in an objective manner, and be worth their cost in installing and operating.

I am related to the Winner Publishing Company. The company produces educational books and CDs for CBSE, Engineering, Medical, BCA, MCA, MBA, B.Com, etc. The following figure shows the management planning and control process:

Now we will design a control system for controlling the performance in departments of the Politecnico of Milano.

According to this approach, six variables appear critical: the constraints of the system, the set of activities carried out by the organization, the architecture (i.e. the levels and the sub-units of the organization involved), the performance measurement techniques, the control process and the structure of reports.

All these variables show peculiar characteristics in public, non-profit oriented companies, but the design of the architecture and the identification of the analytical tools seem to be the most important in determining the global effectiveness of the system.

With regard to architecture, we illustrate a general scheme of the meta- structure of a government body; in this model, three basic elements can be individuated, which are:

• the stakeholders;
• the objectives of the organization;
• the internal structure.

More precisely, the design of a public service company must start from the identification of stakeholders and of their requests. In the present work, stakeholders have been grouped in three major categories, according to the nature of the relationship with the single service:

• direct users: who actually makes use of the service;
• indirect users, that are affected in some way by the performance level of a public service;
• community (society), since in the end the availability and quality of these kind of services have a strong impact on the quality of life of a nation.

Once the identification of stakeholders and of their needs has been completed, it is possible to fix the precise goals of the organization, i.e. the kind and the target of the service to be provided. This step, in its turn, is a fundamental prerequisite for the definition of the internal structure. Three types of internal resources have been individuated, concerning:

• the direct service provider (for example, university or school teachers, doctors, etc.);
• the support services, including all those secondary activities (such as administration, secretarial staffs, legal office, cleaning and maintenance) which allow the regular carrying out of primary activities. The global level of a public organization performance is heavily influenced by the efficiency of these activities, which influence users' opinion about the quality of the provided service, too;
• the infrastructures, i.e. all the physical subunits of the organization that are often of fundamental importance in determining the quality of a service and, consequently, the opinion of its users.

Only after the analysis of these three basic blocks (stakeholders, objectives and internal structure), it is possible to start elaborating the analytical tools: here, the need of expanding the traditional financial measures led to the identification of five categories of indexes, whose importance depend on the characteristics of each company:

• capacity indexes, that measure the maximum output of the service;
• utilisation (or saturation) indexes, that measure the dimensional adequacy of the organization;
• quality indexes, which can concern different aspects: effectiveness, regularity, technical characteristics of the provided service, etc.;
• cost indexes, in absolute or relative terms;
• synthetic indexes, which relate data and indexes coming from different categories.

Aquatic weed control is a management plan that incorporates preventive methods such as proper pond construction and maintenance, biological methods such as the grass carp (Ctenopharyngodonidella)and the use of labeled aquatic herbicides. The development of an aquatic weed management plan is dependent upon correctly identifying the problem weed(s) and selecting control methods that are compatible with efficient fish culture procedures.

Basic methods used to control weeds include preventive, mechanical, biological and chemical techniques. Determining which of these techniques to use involves consideration of the target weed species, fish production objectives for the pond, secondary water uses and the cost of treatment options.

It is easier and less costly to prevent weed problems than it is to control them once they develop. Careful pond site selection and proper pond construction practices are the first steps in preventing aquatic weed problems.

The grass carp is a practical and economical way to control certain types of pond weeds. Grass carp effectively control weeds with tender succulent vegetation such as filamentous algae and duckweed, but are ineffective in controlling weeds that have tough, woody vegetation such as waterlily and cattail.

Various types of aquatic weed cutters and harvesters have been developed for canals and large reservoirs. Use of these machines is not practical in fish ponds.

Herbicides may be used to control weeds in commercial fish ponds.

Q.2. Explain what is the basis of differentiation of tasks and activities in your organisation or any organisation you are familiar with. Suggest three definite improvements in the organisation structure, which would enhance its effectiveness. Briefly describe the organisation you are referring to.

Answer.