Glossary of management terms

Feed forward control is a system for controlling work. It sets the standards before things are done It says what and how things should happen.

Feedback control is a system for controlling work. It focuses on the outputs of production (the product or the service). It is made up of four steps:

1. Review the standards you want to meet.
2. Measure actual performance compared with these standards.
3. Tell people how well or poorly they are doing.
4. Improve things so that standards will be achieved better in future.

An organisational structure is a way of dividing a business into jobs, tasks and responsibilities. There are lots of different ways of doing this. One way is to look at structure according to the focus of the work. Organisations that focus on specialties such as accounting or marketing are called functional because they group these functions together.