The Management Functions of Planning and Controlling

Henri Fayol's six primary functions of management are forecasting, planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. These six functions that were proposed by Henry Fayol in 1925 are still considered as a reference in contemporary administrative work and many studies have been produced related to this subject and was the first who identified the management functions (Papp & Pajrok, 2010). Planning and controlling are two very key components of the functions and remain important parts of the functions of management. They work together but play different roles in the management process.

Management Functions of Planning

Management planning is the process of accessing an organization's goals and creating a plan of action for reaching those goals. All organizational planning must recognize the logical business expectations of the concern (Trickett, 1946). Situational analysis is the first step in the formal planning process. It is the analyzing of needs of the organization by examining the internal and external factors that affect the business. SWOT is the tool used for situational analysis. It is an anagram that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. All that is required is to list the organization's strengths and weaknesses and to identify its opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the organization and can be directly managed by it. Opportunities and threats are external to the organization, so these can only be speculated until the organization is in a position to react on them. SWOT is a widely accepted tool because it is simple to understand and use. This tool has five key benefits that are simple to do and practical to use, clear to understand, focuses on the key internal and external factors affecting the company, helps to identify future goals, and initiates further analysis. Effectiveness and efficiency are two goals that every organization wants to achieve and are crucial to any organization that wants to remain competitive. Both words are used in similar situations in management where effectiveness is doing the right things and efficiency is doing things right.

Strategic planning is setting priorities, focusing energy and resources, strengthening operations, ensuring that employees and stakeholders are working toward common goals, and determining how the organization can best achieve their goals. This is done by establishing the company's mission, the company's vision, and goals. This is the beginning of the roadmap for what the organization is planning to accomplish. Mission statements are a written statement of the organization's purpose and primary objectives in their measurement of success. A vision statement defines the organizations purpose according to its values and not bottom line measures. Benchmarking is a means of comparing an organizations to its competitors as well as higher level organizations which improves performance identifying and applying the best demonstrated traits from the comparisons. Strategy foundation is the part of strategic planning that produces a clear set of recommendations, with supporting explanations, that revise as necessary the mission and objectives of the organization, and supply the strategies for accomplishing them. Implementation is the final phase of strategic planning where all of the strategic plans are implemented to reach the organization's mission.

Operational planning guides the organization by setting priorities and accomplishing what needs to be done to accomplish the company's mission. Policies outline the actions to be taken during certain events while attaining the organization's goals. Procedures and rules offer more specific guidelines for employees to follow. Budgets