Basic Principles of Management
Are you wondering what are responsibility of a Manager? In this blog, I will talk about the basic principles of management that will help you to understand the responsibilities of a manager.
Here are the 7 principles.
Management principles are higher order functions of management. These helps you to understand your responsibilities better. To perform each of the principles or functions you will need to develop certain skills.
For example, to collaborate, you might have to develop skill related to building trust. Similarly, for reporting, you might have to develop presentation and excel skills.
With that, let me deep dive on each of the principles.
#1 Planning
Project planning, resource planning / allocation is one of the commonly performed task by a Manager.
The plan should be regularly reviewed with the stakeholders to showcase the progress and employee bandwidth utilisation.
A manager’s responsibility is to keep the plan up-to-date. This will help to identify any delays or risks ahead of time. In turn, this helps to take pro-active corrective action to minimise the impact due to delays or risks.
The same applies to allocation of team member to various tasks / projects that must be completed.
#2 Processes
A process is set of steps that every body in the team should follow while performing a task. These steps ensure consistency in the way your team perform tasks and take it to closure.
It is manager responsibility to define the process, make team members to adhere to the process.
Another responsibility of manager is to review the processes regularly to,
- eliminate steps that are no longer needed,
- automate certain steps which are taking more time,
- simplify a process, if it has become an overhead.
A process should always help team members to bring consistency in the way they take up a task, work on it and close it. The process should not become an overhead to the team.
#3 Staffing
Another responsibility of a Manager is to regularly check
- how many members are available in the team?
- how each of team member are allocated?
- how much of each team member’s bandwidth is utilised?
- how many members are available for new work?
Staffing exercise is needed to make sure that there is always a healthy number of team members available for taking up work.
If there are not enough team members to take on, then hiring requests should be raised. It is also important to check whether any team member may decide to quit — if so, backfill for that position should be planned.
#4 Leading
Every manager must lead a team! Isn’t that obvious.
Leading here refers to providing direction and making decision to move towards desired outcome.
These directions and decisions could be strategical or technical. But only a manager can make decisions and provide direction. The team members must be consulted as necessary, but the final call should be made by a manager.
Since the manager is making the final call, the consequence of that decision or going in certain direction should be owned by the manager itself.
Leading here also refers to providing support and creating learning opportunities to each team member for their career growth.
A manager must understand the aspiration, skill level and motivation level of each team member. Based on these, a manager must always plan to help them to become better at what they do and in turn help them to move up in their careers.
#5 Collaborating
Every manager works with many stakeholders. It could be Product Managers, QA Managers, Infrastructure Managers, and other Development Managers.
It is important to understand that one manager cannot single handedly do everything; support from other peer managers will always be needed.
So, working collaboratively towards achieving a common goal should be more important than ego clashes.
The best way to collaboratively work is to build trust among peer manager and bring transparency about the team’s progress. Be proactive in communication about any delays, issues or dependencies.
#6 Reporting
Any manager should create reports regularly and share it with all the stakeholders. A better reporting strategy will help you and your team to get necessity support from other teams and higher management.
The reporting principle acts as the interface between you and your peers.
The reporting should include, project progress, dependencies, risks and issues. If any milestones will be missed, then it should be highlighted way before the due date.
The reports should always be centralised to all the stakeholders. The reports should be discussed and any decisions needed, should be made in a meeting. The decisions should be documented centrally and shared with all the stakeholders.
#7 Budgeting
Budget should include infrastructure, license and anything that will incur cost for the team’s operation or for the project.
The resource cost could also be part of the budgeting. This will vary from company to company. Sometimes finance team does this.
But as a manager it will be important to understand, what are the cost that will be incurred and how that can influence recognising the margins.
The budgeting will help managers to optimise for cost. For example, if the infrastructure cost is going up, then an effort to optimise the usage of infrastructure should be taken up. This will help the organisation to maintain margins.
In conclusion, the 7 principles helps you to perform your duties better as manager.
Creating a skill for getting better at each of the principles will help you to grow in the management career path.
Here is the summary of all the 7 principles.
- Planning — includes project, resource and to be updated regularly.
- Processes — set of steps that should be followed by every team member.
- Staffing — maintain a healthy availability of members for allocation.
- Leading — provide directions, support and make decisions.
- Collaborating — build trust and transparency with peer managers.
- Reporting — includes progress, risks, dependencies, issues, delays.
- Budgeting — any cost that occurs while executing a project.
Use the above principles as a guide to perform your duties better as a manager.
Happy management!
Further Reading
