Dividing up the work between he departments will mean that all the tasks that need to be completed, are done so with great detail and to a good standard in required time to keep the business at the peak of its success. An example in H&M would be, that every department has a deadline by which they have to have done their part of year report for the Annual Report, so all the departments are doing different tasks and writing about their year, but in the end it’s put into one big annual report to be used as progress check and presented to some of the stakeholders such as the shareholders and the head office.
AMA is described as a medium sized equines; yet the work is still divided between the departments so that all tasks are completed on time and up to a good standard, the difference is that there is much less staff in each department and some staff have more than one type of responsibility within the business. The Finance and The IT support carry out their job separately, but if new IT equipment or computers/hardware needs to be bought, the department doesn’t just buy it, they consult the finance department and have to get permission for the money to be spent.
They have to put the reasons forward as to why the equipment is needed. Lines of control and communication: There’s always a structure to success. If there was no structure in an organization then a lot of jobs would not be carried out at all or not carried out to the best standard. Also some of the decisions made by different departments and different people could contradict and therefore cause conflicts within the organization which could result in a ‘clash’ and therefore a huge loss or even bankruptcy in very large organizations depending on decisions made.
This is why meetings are held within departments, and then they’re reported to there departments and the person/people that are responsible for them (going up/down the line of power). This communication within the business is very important. In new policies and highest levels of decision making (such as strategic decisions) are carried out by the shareholders and Annual General Meeting body.
These decisions affect the other people within the organization will be working and organizing their tasks; the new changes would be delivered to Board of Directors and Managing Director and fifteen other individuals. (Corporate Governance Report, 2013) In AMA the decision making is done by the Trustees who are the directors of the company; after decisions are made, they’re passed onto the head of the school where he/she then passed the information and decisions made down the academies line management.
Structure Types: There are many types of structures in organization; here are some examples of them: Functional: This is where the organizational structure is where people with similar knowledge and skills are grouped together and have a person in charge of them. This works well in small companies as it helps develop the employees to be specialist in their field (specialization increases the speed and confidence f the employees for the tasks being carried out); but there can be some issues such as the communication across the employees horizontally is not maintained well, which can slow down decision making.
This also compromises the level of communication/cooperation between the functional units which can slow down a lot of work and bring down the production levels. Geographical: This is where organizations have offices or business units in different geographic locations; that work together to make up a large company. This is how most international and global businesses operate all over the world. The organizations ‘offices’ work individually by sticking to the business policies to work as one big company.
Depending on how big the business is and its industry, every geographical location might report to an executive or directly to the head office. Hierarchical: This is an organizational structure that consists of multiple levels; the structure represented diagram wise would be pyramid, with the base of the pyramid being the workers, who are directly supervised by a smaller level above them and so on; up to the director/president/CEO of the company which would be right at the top of the company (tip of the pyramid).
Matrix: In this type of organization; the employees report everyday work to the project managers/supervisors across the departmental boundaries of authority (horizontally) and reports all of the performance to the head of department who are (vertically) above them in the level of authority who then report to their head of department and so on… Therefore the work and achievements are not only reported vertically, but also horizontally across the line management table.
Divisional: This type of organization groups all employees into parallel teams that focus on a specific service/product/purpose. They’re not split into departments; they’re more individual and normally manage their own hiring, finances and advertisement duties. This mostly applies to large organizations. Product: The managers of departments report to the president or the head of the company by the type of product. Type of customer: This type of structure is in place to ensure specific customer expectations are met.
This specializes the needs of customers well, although it can sometimes ignore the needs of other types of customers. Types of structure in H: “H&M has a matrix organization in which the Managing Director appoints he numbers of the executive management team and the country managers. ” (Company Management, 2014) Shareholders (and Annual General Meeting), are the most important people in the business, they appoint the Auditors, Election Committee and the Board of Directors, who then appoint the others, and so on.
The executive management team is made up of the Managing Director and fifteen other individuals who are responsible for each department of the company and the support, training and best practice according to policies and instructions provided by the Head Office, of their department;: Finance, Accounts, Buying, Sales and Marketing, Production, Sustainability, Expansion, New Business, Brand, Communications, Investor Relations, Human Resources, IT, Logistics and Security. The country managers have all the responsibility for sales, profitability and all the departments in their country.
The Board of Directors is responsible for the Auditing Committee and Managing Director and CEO, who are directly responsible for the Executive management team and the country managements who report to them, they are in charge of their teams and providing the training and more to the people they’re in charge of. Therefore the Managing Director and the CEO have a large span of control, but the Country Managers have an even larger span of control as they’re responsible for more people. Corporate Governance Report , 2013) This structure helps them fulfill their purposes (that are stated below) by making sure the decision making is passed down to the departments to be achieved and carried out, but everything always has to be reported back from every department. For example H’s shareholders make the decisions on the company’s direction, therefore they appoint the Board of Directors and the Chairman of the Board. In the Annual General Meeting they also elect the auditors, who report back to them on the work of the Election Committee.
This goes on in the organization, one electing another and being reported back to; this creates success for the company by all departments always reporting back to at least one level; therefore if there’s anything that isn’t going well, can be notices ASAP and something can be done about it at an early stage by changing some of the smaller objectives of the organization departments rather than having to make any strategic decisions by the GM that could make or break the organizations success.
Types of Structure and the span of control in AMA: The people with the highest responsibility in the academy are at the very top of the diagram (in this diagram it’s the head principal, in blue), who are directly responsible for the vice principals and the business development manager (yellow). The staff in yellow, are directly responsible for the staff in purple who are in authority of staff members in green (who don’t normally have no span control; although some do have the responsibility of staff in light blue.
This can all be seen by the key at the bottom of the structure. This structure in the academy allows good communication for the employees all the way from the top to bottom, increasing the span of control; top to bottom. This helps to achieve the target of providing education to the local community and therefore fulfill their purpose.
This is because the communication in the academy improves the awareness and understanding of the teachers and staff that is then passed down to the students; which helps the academy achieve their aims and purpose which are to pass the knowledge and provide world- class education to the students, with this structure, everything is organized, ND employees all have their roles, resulting in as much help to the students as possible, their progress is monitored by designated people, and the information is passed up and down the business, to the right people, which concludes in less misunderstanding.
The span of control does vary within the academy, with P Lamb who’s in charge of about 10 persons, whereas J Neil isn’t in charge of anyone, leaving her with no span of control. Functional areas: Finance in H & AMA: The finance department produce information that managers use to make decisions for the organization. In H some examples would be; the cost of asking products, renting facilities, offices etc… In AMA some examples could be; how many more site staff they can hire, cost of school laptops, projectors, whiteboards etc…
Marketing in H & AMA: The marketing for AMA would carry out most of their marketing through the social media, this is to make the academy known nationwide. An example would be school concert or other event that would be poetaster locally or nationally; maybe on the internet. The school has their own Marketing department in H would be much more busy with the advertisements of products, prices, promotions etc. This is to make any potential customers interested and to try and sell the products to the customers. Production in & AMA: The production team in H are the factories, mainly.
The factories are not owned by H, but they do carry out regular audits, making sure the working facilities are good. The factories would make all the products H sell, from clothes to accessories and other products. In AMA, the production team wouldn’t play as big of a part; they produce the school planners, some booklets, occasionally books etc. Customer service in & AMA: They seek to make the customers happy at every stage of their relationship with he company, from before the purchase, to after purchase and aftercare of the products.
In H&M the customer services would take care of any type of customer communication to the organization. In AMA, the customer service is the student services and the visitors reception; they WOUld take care of any requests and communication from the stakeholders and direct them to the right department or provide them with basic information. Sales in H&M: Sales department in H&M generates the revenue. They are similar to the marketing department, but marketing department will advertise the goods to he public more; whereas the sales department is the one that actually collects the money or take orders and other commitments to buy a product.
Therefore marketing creates the conditions for sees to happen. Human resources in & AMA: Human Resources department is responsible for everything to do with managing the employees. In H&M this department would have the responsibility of hiring the employees, training them to the guidelines given by the Head Office, as well as making sure their employees are being treated fairly and accordingly to the policies of the company and the law.
Human Resources in AMA are responsible for hiring teaches, site staff and any other staff for the academy, as well as have the administrative role such as policy making, welfare, supportive education and developmental roles, as well as make sure that the students are safe which would means setting guidelines for the academy. How does the organization make strategic plans? Strategic plans and SMART: SMART is an acronym which stands for; S- Specific, while making the strategic plans and setting the company objectives, both of the businesses have to aim their objectives to what the business is al about, what they do and what they want.
M-Measurable, this means that the objective they’re setting, is made up of a few or many targets that need to be achieved in order for them to achieve the objective. They have to be able to measure the success of their progress or objective overall. A-Assignable, everyone within the business has to understand the objectives so that they would be able to take part in making those objectives come true. This also means that the business knows which departments will do what, so every store/ department will be set targets to specific concepts of the business.
R-Realistic, every objective has to be achievable within a set period of time, they have to be realistic with the objectives and targets they set, for example if the target was for all students to pass with at least Ass in all their subjects next year in a school, that would not be realistic, but to increase the amount of students that get grades A*- C by a certain percentage every year, is realistic. T-Time specific, this is how long the business has to achieve the objective, the business needs to plan on how to achieve the objectives in a specific time period.
Strategic plan/SMART in H: In one of their objectives/targets is to “increase the number of stores by 10-15% each year. ” (Annual Report , 2013) This objective is specific as it precisely states what their objective is. It is also Measurable as the business can measure how much they expand, and there are numbers that need to be met, H needs to predict and then measure how many stores are open and how many should open as well as how many will.
This objective is Assignable which means that they can assign certain people and departments to take care of the expansion and they can plan out who. The objective Realistic, because it has been achieved n the past few years, such as in the financial year of 2013, it’s also realistic and achievable as they have a net total of 375 new stores planned to open in the financial year of 2014, which already reaches the limit. They just need to physically open the stores. It’s time-specific as they clearly state that they have a year to achieve their target for every year. Annual Report , 201 3) These objectives came about by carrying out audits within the business and evaluating the progress. Strategic plan/SMART in AMA: An example of a strategic plan in AMA is to help the students achieve at least 5 A*-C grades by the time they finish year 1 1 . This is specific, as they know exactly what they want for each and every student. It’s measurable as it’s measured every year after the examination results have been received for the students.
This is also assignable and achievable as AMA have recently been improving results every year, until the 2014 summer results drop, but they seek to keep on improving again, they provide extra support for the students if needed and try to do whatever they can to make sure they teach to best standard as well as they can assign staff to monitor students progress and help them where they need ore help. The plan is realistic as there’s been a high increase in the students achieving these grades.
It’s time-specific as it’s measured every year, and it can either be met, or not, so every year the academy has from September until the exams, to achieve the targets. Throughout both of the organizations, objectives cascade through the organization, it’s all about the departments working together and giving feedback on progress and development. Objectives are created very similarly; in one it goes past more people than the other, this is due to the size of the organization. The policies are made by owners and directors of the company, to which, departments and employees have to adhere to and fulfill.
This creates objectives for the people below, who create even smaller and other targets for the employees in their span of control; those employees working together and achieving their targets, generates the success for the organizations. A better way to explain this is; an organization creates a new policy or a new aim (such as increase the number of stores by 10-15% each year), this is then passed down to all of the departments, where some will have to put in more effort into t than others, which means the expansion department will have to create new targets and objectives for their employees, in order to make this aim come true.
