Three Level of Management:Top,Middle & Lower

 DECISION MAKING

"The act of choosing one alternative among a set of alternatives is called decision making"

In each and every step of our life, there is a need to make the decision. For example, as a student we decide about college for our studies and in our daily life, we selected the functions etc which we attend. Similarly, the managers spent most of their time in decision making.

TOP MANAGEMENT DECISIONS

Top management defines goals at the time of developing plans and establishing strategies they make decisions.

MIDDLE AND LOWER MANAGEMENT DECISION

The middle and lower management decide that what tasks are to be performed, how these tasks will be grouped and who will perform the tasks? what product is to be produced, what market should be selected for launching our products and standard of product is also decided. It also decided that how to produce when and where to produce? who will report to whom?

TYPES OF DECISIONS:

PROGRAMMED DECISIONS:

"A decision that is fairly structured or recurs with some frequency or both are known as programmed Decision"

NON-PROGRAMMED DECISION:

"A decision that is relatively UN structured occurs much less than the programmed decision is known non-programmed decision"

                      DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

Recognizing and defining the nature of a decision, identifying alternatives, choosing the best alternative putting it into practice.

  Steps of Decision Making

Identification of the problem:

IDENTIFICATION OF PROBLEMS

The discrepancy or the difference between the current state and desired state. The problem should be carefully and properly detected. It is said that "Half of the problem is solved with the identification of that problem. Before identification correctly, the decision can not be made rightly.

Identification of Decision Criteria:

After the identification of problems that need very much attention, the decision criteria are important for solving the problems. The manager has to decide what factors are relevant for the elimination of our problem and what factors are relevant. In a computer problem, price, durability, and size are decision criteria.

Allocation of Weight to Criteria:

The criteria identification is stepped No.2 are not equally important. The price factor may be important for someone. Someone give importance to warranties, some prefer screen size. Some identified weight are less important some are more important.so, the manager should give weight to these criteria according to his priorities. A simple approach is merely to give the most important criteria, a weight of  10 points and then assign weight to the rest according to their importance.

Developing the Alternatives:

The fourth step requires listing the different alternatives that could succeed in resolving the problem. For example, p1,p2 IBM, Toshiba, etc are the alternatives for the purchase of a computer for us. In this step, there is only need to list down the alternatives and not need to evaluate their plus and negative points.

Analyzing the Alternatives:

Once the alternatives have been identified, the manager must critically analyze the alternatives. In this step, comparison of the alternatives is made by the checking the merits and demerits, strengths and weaknesses of all alternatives. The merits of each alternative are multiplied by weights.

Selecting an alternative:

The step relates to choosing alternative among all which we have developed and analyzed. First, we develop the decisions criteria and weight them. Then we develop different alternatives and evaluate them. Now we have to choose one alternative among all. We will choose that has got the highest score in step No.5

Implementation of Alternative:

Although the choice process has finished in step 6 but the implementation in an important part of the decision making process. It means to convey the decision to those affected by the problems and to the committed for action or decision.
The decision may still fail if it is not properly implemented. So, for the solution of the problem, the decision should properly be implemented.

Evaluation of decision Effectiveness:

Evaluating means to check that"Did the alternative chosen in step 6 and implemented in step 7, accomplish or achieve the desirable objective?"Whether it has corrected the problem or not? The result is evaluated through a control function.
                                conclusion
From planning to controlling, in all the management functions, decisions are needed. So should be equality in the decision, as the success or failure of an organization depends upon the managerial decision. Maximum information should be collected while making decision e.g
information about social, economic, political factors etc. Before making the decision, managers should look deeply into the organization's environment.