Controlling
Controlling is measuring actual performance against standards and correcting deviations. This domain tests the control process, its importance and limits, its link with planning, and traditional versus modern techniques.
Control process
Setting standards, measuring actual performance, comparing actual with standards, analysing deviations, taking corrective action. Two supporting ideas: critical point control (focus on key result areas) and management by exception (act only on significant deviations).
Features and importance
Goal-oriented, pervasive, continuous, and both backward-looking (evaluates past results) and forward-looking (corrects future action). Importance: accomplishing goals, judging the accuracy of standards, motivating employees, maintaining order and discipline, coordinating action, improving efficiency.
Limitations
Difficulty in setting quantitative standards, limited control over external factors, resistance from employees, and the cost of the control system.
Planning–control relationship
Planning is prescriptive, control is evaluative. Planning supplies the standards; control supplies feedback for the next plan. Planning without control is meaningless, and control without planning is blind.
Techniques
Traditional: personal observation, statistical reports, break-even analysis, budgetary control. Modern: PERT and CPM, management information systems, ratio analysis, responsibility accounting.
Worked example
Budgeted sales are 10,000 units at a standard cost of ₹50; actual sales are 9,200 units at ₹52. Reasoning: two deviations exist - volume is down 800 units (unfavourable) and cost is up ₹2 per unit (unfavourable). Measure both before prescribing action; the correction may be a new promotion plan plus a vendor renegotiation.
Traps that cost marks
Saying control is only backward-looking; classifying break-even analysis as modern; omitting the corrective-action step from the process.