Four Functions of Management

The four functions of management

The Los Angeles county Department of Public Social Sevices has a mission statement it is "To enrich lives throught effective and caring service." DPSS is a large organization with many district offices throughout the county. They service millions of poor families with little to no income or resources. They do this by using taxpayers dollars to fund programas like Health insurance, Foodstamps, cash aid, and Homeless services to needy families and individuals. DPSS sets goals constantly to stay true to their mission statement. This organization uses the four functions of management planning, organizing leading and controlling in order to achieve those goals. One of DPSS's big goals this year has been to increase the amount of participants receiving Foodstamp assistance.

When the highest level of management which are the directors set this Goal for the department they had to come up with a plan in order to achieve the goal. "

Planning is specifying the goals to be achieved and deciding in advance the appropriate actions needed to achieve those goals (Thomas S. Bateman, 2009)." The goal was to increase the amount of foodstamps that were being issued. The plan that they came up with was to restructurize the program so that it would be easier for needy people to qualify and decrease the amount of applications that were being denied.

Once a plan is in place Administration will begin to start organizing. Organizing is assembling and coordinating the human, financial, physical, informational, and other resources needed to achieve goals (Thomas S. Bateman, 2009). They had to cordinate the people and get rid of certain positions that were not necessary and place those people in spots that were needed. Financially DPSS had to really look at what type of funding they could get since the government is hurting real bad in this bad economy. All the available resources had to be analysed so that they were not being wasted in order to maximize the outcome in an effective and efficient way.

Once Administration has organized a plan and gathered all the resources to achieve the goal management is brought into the loop. Management is in charge of probably the most important part leading. "Leading is stimulating people to be high performers. It includes motivating and communicating with employees, individually and in groups (Thomas S. Bateman, 2009)." Managers have to lead the front line and the people that actually do the work. Managers need to work with their employees and motivate them and help them by letting them know what is expected and by when it needs to be completed. Once the workforce understand their duties and they start to impliment the new procedures managers need to be able to control the workforce. We were re-trained and given the new guidelines that were implemented. We have had to completely change the way we evaluate cases certain qualifiying criteria has been eliminated in order to qualify more needy people into receiving foodstamp benefits. We are constantly reporting errors to management that we are finding because our previouse system is not recognizing the new changes in the program, and it is issuing erroneouse benefits. We have to constantly be controlling our applications and letting management know what we are dealing