"Management control is a process that enables an organisation to clarify its performance objectives and guide their achievement while ensuring that the actions undertaken by its various units are coherent."

With that definition, this book places the control process at the heart of the manager's role within the organisation. It offers a refreshing vision of management control by organising its discourse around the fundamental challenges involved in the control process. Understanding these challenges will enable managers to enrich the way they create the tools that support the process.

Chapter 1 offers a synthesis of management control's scope and functions. It provides the reader with an overview of the themes developed in later sections:

• Part 1 is devoted to the challenge of measuring performance, which forms the basis of management control systems and comprises several different facets. A distinction is made between measurement systems elaborated at the corporate level and those devised at more detailed levels (business units) which comprise various perspectives. The section clarifies the principles on which each different measurement system is elaborated.

• Part 2 develops the control cycle and its two main components - planning and ex post results analysis - and highlights each stage's goals and principles. These provide a framework that allows us to take a more nuanced look at the debate surrounding relevance of budgets.

• Part 3 takes a look at some important complementary questions, detailing the different types of Performance Programmes that companies have been developing alongside their management control systems. It also stresses the importance of information systems and the tremendous developments they have experienced recently.

This book is aimed at managers - the principal players in the control process -, the controllers who animate the process, and students pursuing advanced management studies. It contains examples, quiz sections with answers and explanations, and a synthesis of the key messages of each chapter. This format enables readers to approach the richness of the control process in a progressive, concrete and structured manner.

• Foreword Control and Performance Processes
• Management Control and Performance Processes
• Measuring in order to manage
  • Defining and measuring corporate performance
  • Defining and measuring unit performance
• The control cycle
  • Planning and budgeting
  • Monitoring and analyzing actual performance
  • Beyond budgeting?
• Questions of organization
  • Performance Programmes
  • Information systems and management control
• List of figures and tables
• Index