The paper studies the process of decision making at various levels in organisations. The assignment is set against the backdrop of a railway operating company called Northern Train which is set renovate a station. The station is unstaffed and does not contain level crossing. This means that the company has to reconstruct the station and have level crossings construction. The company Northern Train operates railway services in Northern England and researcher has considered Northern England the backdrop of the construction work. The paper opens with a study of the key factors which is considered by the Northern Trains. It consists of the developments that the Northern trains ensure. The report ensures the fact that the project is completely successful. This section has details about the geography, population and economic conditions of Northern England. The next section studies the various levels of management where the decision-making takes place. The section delves into the importance of the different levels of management to ensure execution of projects. This is followed by application of an appropriate decision making model which Northern Train can use to make decisions regarding the construction of the station. The fourth section deals with the contingency plans which the company needs to make while renovating the station. This section has an elementary budget and a graph to explain the contingency measures. The final section studies ways, which the apex management can use to monitor its decisions.
The first important criterion, which has to be considered to renovate railways, is the geography of their locations. I can assume that the Finadale Station is located in Northern England since the company Northern Train operates the station. An analysis of the geography of the location shows that the most of Northern England is occupied by the majestic Pennines Ranges. The Altantic Ocean washes the shores of the Northern England. A study of the relief features of the region reveals that a considerable portion of it comes under have parklands and national parks. This information about physical feature is important because the railway company building the railway network would require it to time their construction work and operation. For example, the presence of steep slopes of Pennines Range would require the company to use methods like rack railway technology or funicular railways to prevent the trains from sliding down the track (Wojtas-Hara? 2016). The presence of rivers and hills would require construction of bridges and cause ways to ensure movement of the trains. Similarly, the company constructing the station should build shaded railway platforms and over the lines to keep out snow and rain since, Northern England receive very heavy snow and rainfall, which are hazardous to railway transport (Wojtas-Hara?, 2016). This analysis shows that the railway company in renovating the station should form station and track construction plan considering the geographical conditions.
The next important criterion, which Northern Train as per my reflection should consider to renovate the station in Finadale, is demography. The railway company should consider the population of the place. This is important to form strategies regarding the construction of the platform. For example, if the population of the place is high, the size of the waiting area should be big to accommodate a large number of waiting passengers. Moreover, the demography of the region should be considered while construction of the shops (Steel et al. 2014). For example, an analysis of the population of Northern England shows that, various groups like, people who are British by birth, Europeans, Asians, Africana and Americans, inhabit it. The majority of the people are Christians while considerable ratio of the population consists of Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists. Thus, the shops should sell items to satisfy the needs of these diverse populations and earn high profits. This analysis shows that Northern Train should consider the population of North England while updating the structure of the station.
I can reflect that the economic conditions of places play very role in the construction of infrastructure like railway stations. This is because the upper class people prefer travelling by flight or by private cars. The lower and the middle class people prefer to travel by public transportation modes like trains. For example, Northern England has considerable population of middle and lower middle class people. This means the station would receive a huge number of people. This consideration is very important in order to estimate the profit the company can generate after investing £ 20 million towards construction of the railway station (Pike et al. 2015). This because a large number of middle class and lower middle commuters would mean high sale of tickets which would generate huge profits to the operating companies like Northern Train.
Tourist attractions are a very criterion in my opinion, which Northern Train must consider while renovating the station. This is because; tourist attractions are capable of attracting tourists from the other parts of England and foreign countries. An analysis of Northern England shows that the region has several World Heritage sites like the Durham Castle and the Fountain Abbey (Clayton et al. 2014). This shows that these tourist attractions would attract foreign tourists in large numbers and earn huge revenue from them. This shows that renovation of Finadale station in Northern England would be profitable. This would enable the company to earn high revenue from selling tickets at high rates and providing services to these large tourist populations. It would also encourage development of other infrastructure like roads in the Finadale area (Rajesh 2013).
The management levels in organisations play very important role in decision-making. The consideration of criteria Northern Train needs to consider reconstructing the railway station in Finadale clearly points out to the importance of the management levels in making decisions. The management level in organisations consists of four levels, the board of directors, the top managers, the middle level managers and the employees who execute the orders (Armstrong and Taylor 2014). The following section would identify the relevance of these management levels in decision making in Northern Train.
The four management levels play significant role in making decisions. The lower level management consisting of the executive and junior employees collect market information in Northern England like population, the elevation of the land and economic conditions of the people. They communicate this information to the middle level managers who in turn pass the information to the upper level. The upper level management as a result is able to acquire a great deal of information and use it to make appropriate decisions. This ensures that the decisions are based on a large number of sample data, which lends them accuracy (Goetsch and Davis 2014). Thus, management levels play significant roles in ensuring that the apex management takes appropriate decisions.
The multiple levels of decision-making ensure effective execution of the decision-making. The strategies and decisions made by the apex management are communicated down the hierarchy. The middle level managers segregate these decisions among the lower level managers who in turn allocate them among the lower level employees. This multilevel system ensures efficient allocation of job responsibilities among the employees as per their experiences, capabilities and educational qualifications (Graham, Harvey and Puri 2015). This analysis shows that multiple levels involved in decision making ensure timely execution of strategies.
The study would consider rational or economic man model to be applied to the decision making of Northern Train. The economic man model as shown in the figure, identifies the various alternatives the managers can consider while decision making. This facilitates tracking the movement of the resources and helps the managers to locate faults, which they can rectify. The rational model allows the managers to take rational decisions towards execution of the strategies made by the apex management (Child and Hsieh 2014).
The evaluation of the case study shows that the company Northern Train is constructing a new station. The apex management of the company requires obtaining information regarding the environment of Northern England like population and economic conditions. The mangers require allocating the task of command execution among the employees (Smith 2014). They require identifying the various alternatives, which they can consider while restructuring the railway station. This analysis shows that the management of Northern Train should consider rational model.
The company in order to deal with construction related risks need to prepare contingency plans. The case study shows that Northern Train is planning to rebuild the railway station. This exposes the project to several contingencies stemming due to lack of resources, time, lack of expertise and change in customer preferences. Moreover, the region of Northern England has hostile physical and climatic conditions, which pose threat to the restructuring of the railway station (Cummings and Worley 2014). The main risks to the project of railway station renovation are time, budget and resources.
The biggest threat challenging a project is time because it results in increase of expenditure due to non-completion of project within time. As stated in the case study, the project of revamping the railways station has been allocated a fund of £ 20 million. The figure shows that amount allocated towards the project has been divided among three cost centres namely, human resources, machinery and miscellaneous expenses like survey, electricity and maintenance of portions of the project completed. The graph below shows that if it is assumed that the project would be extended for 1 year where the actual target time is 5 years and all the expenses are assumed by rise by 1 percent, the expenditure would supersede the amount of 20 million allocated to the project by 1 percent (Moody and Galletta 2015). Thus, from the budget and the graph it is clear that time a very contingency factor for projects. Failure of the companies to complete projects within the target time leads to manifold increase in the expenditure.
|
Budget of the railway project |
|||
|
Sources of funds |
£ |
Expenditure |
£ |
|
Allocated funds |
20,000,000.00 |
Human resources |
1,000,000.00 |
|
Machinery |
10,000,000.00 |
||
|
Miscellaneous expenditure |
9,000,000.00 |
||
|
20,000,000.00 |
20,000,000.00 |
The company should form a contingency plan to deal with time constraint. It can allocate more amounts of funds to the project so that it can mobilise more resources to complete the project within the time. Northern Train can also outsource the different parts of the project to subcontractors to ensure that the construction steps are completed with the target period (Qiao, Wu and Zhou 2014).
The budget and the graph show that extension of projects leads to increase in the expenditures. The construction of railway stations requires huge expenditure in technology, machinery and human resources. Northern Train requires spending amount resources to source metal tracks and other construction materials. Moreover, it has to employ engineering and other skilled experts to manage the project. This analysis shows that the construction of the station places a huge bearing on the budget (Poola et al. 2014).
Northern Train should form contingency plan to deal with the budget constraint. The company should allocate the total amount of resources judiciously. The company can also collaborate with other firms and diversify the risks.
The next contingency category pertains to the resources like materials and machinery, which Northern Train can allocate to the project. The project companies normally mobilise their resources as materials and work force towards projects for a predetermined time period say 5 years. Now if the project tenure were extended, it would cause the construction companies to restrict their resources for that project. This prevents the companies to using its resources in subsequent projects and lead to loss of projects (Haslum and Geffner 2014). Thus, the company should allocate its resources towards multiple projects to avoid loss of projects.
Northern Train must investigate and monitor its decision making process to ensure accurate execution and avoiding expenditures due to extension of projects. The apex management must define the area in which the decision-making has to take place like marketing and finance. They should analyse the problems which they may confront and make appropriate contingency plans to deal with them. The next step is critically evaluating the decision making to locate flaws and take steps to rectify them. The next step is to identify the alternative ways, which the managers take to deal with the problems and choose the best possible way (Tsang 2014). The managers should implement the decision and monitor the outcomes of their decisions. The apex management should take steps if the decision does not achieve the desired outcome.
The case study states Northern Train is renovating the railway platform at Finadale. The study also shows that the region in Northern England is subjected to harsh weather conditions like snow and rain. This is likely to cause extension of the project, which would put immense pressure on the resources. The apex management of the company should form the strategies of constructing the station and managing the project. They should form alternative ways to manage the contingency situations like harsh weather conditions. The middle level managers should evaluate the resources on regular basis and report any future shortages. Thus, it can be evaluated that the apex management should form the decisions and monitor them against the desired results (McCombie and Thirlwall 2016). They should compare between the actual result and the result they sought to achieve. They should take steps to rectify the differences between the two results.
Conclusion:
Upon reflecting on the project of renovating the station at Finadale assumed to be in Northern England, can point out to several facts from the discussions. The station of Finadale is in Northern England which has steep terrains and harsh climatic conditions. This would require Northern Train to allocate huge amount of resources to build the station. Since, the place is sloping, the project of reconstructing of the station and lines would require employment of advanced technology, human resources and materials. The harsh weather of the place is likely to cause the project tenure to extend would in turn increase the expenditure of the company manifold. The company must form an appropriate contingency plan t deal with these probable challenges. The apex management should make accurate decisions and monitor these decisions regular to be able to incorporate any probable changes.
References:
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