What is management and its function within the management process?

Answer 1

Some would define management as an art, while others would define it as a science. Whether management is an art or a science isn't what is most important. Management is a process that is used to accomplish organizational goals; that is, a process that is used to achieve what an organization wants to achieve. An organization could be a business, a school, a city, a group of volunteers, or any governmental entity. Managers are the people to whom this management task is assigned, and it is generally thought that they achieve the desired goals through the key functions of (1) planning, (2) organizing, (3) directing, and (4) controlling. Some would include leading as a managing function, but for the purposes of this discussion, leading is included as a part of directing. Planning: The planning function involves the process of defining goals, establishing strategy for achieving those goals, and developing plans to integrate and coordinate activities. Organizing: It includes the process of determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom at what level decisions are made. Commanding: It is the influencing of people so that they will contribute to organization and group goals. Leading involves motivating, communicating employees to accomplish goals and objectives of an organization Controlling: It is the measuring and correcting of activities of subordinates to ensure that events conform to plans. It measure performance against goals and plans, shows negative deviations exit and by putting in motion actions to correct deviation, helps ensure accomplishment of plans. Process Management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to define, visualize, measure, control, report and improve processes with the goal to meet customer requirements profitably. Some people said that it is different from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. But from another view point, process management includes program management. ISO 9001 promotes the process approach to managing an organization. ...promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing, implementing and improving the effectiveness of a quality management system, to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirements.