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In the Globe Engineering example above we can see that the Project Manager has a span of control of 1:4 fitting in with Graicunuss theories. From here we can see a span of control in the design department of 1:3 and further on I know that the design teams never have more than 5 people in them giving the team leaders a span of control of 1:4 at the worst. This ensures that all workers are supervised sufficiently and the managers/supervisors are not heavily over worked, we hope that this will breed a good feeling and team mentality within the company.
The idea of span of control relies heavily on the Chain of Command, this is again a Military term which has been adopted by the Business community. As can be seen from the diagram above the company has been set up in a pyramid fashion with 1 Director sitting at the top. The chain of command allows for him to make decisions and see them implemented but does not allow for him to directly command a designer in his tasks. The Chain of Command relies heavily upon the use of the management level below to disseminate the instructions of those above.
In short although the Director is the person ultimately responsible for the companys future he is not directly responsible for the designer in one of the design teams. The Director will communicate with the Project Manager who will in turn pass information and instructions to the Management team who will also pass the information down their span of control.
Another point to think of when setting up a management system for a company is to decide if you wish to employ a centralised or a decentralised structure to the satellite offices. One easy way to look at this is to think of Tescos; all Tescos stores are the same company, however each store has a manager who will have certain amounts of autonomy to make decisions. This is known as a decentralised structure where the offices outside of head office have decision making abilities, whereas centralised structures only allow for Head Office to make these decisions.
Each has its own pros and cons and it is the Directors job to decide which of these would fit best within the company. In the Construction Industry one will find that the decentralised structure is more prevalent with each site being able to make the majority of decisions as they are in the best situation to make these decisions. Certain things will always remain