Final answer:
The basic control process in business involves establishing achievable and appropriate standards, measuring performance against those standards, and making adjustments to ensure that actual performance aligns with the set goals.
Step-by-step explanation:
The basic control process involves setting standards to achieve goals, comparing actual performance to those standards, and then making changes to return performance to those standards. When you set your goals, make sure they are achievable and appropriate, and establish a plan for how to achieve them. This involves a preparatory phase, where objectives are defined, an implementation and learning phase, where actions are taken towards the goals, followed by a program evaluation phase to assess the outcomes against the set standards, and lastly, a development of lessons learned phase to make necessary adjustments.
To ensure that progress is measurable and motivational, you must establish criteria for assessing progress. This is essential throughout the control process, particularly in the program evaluation phase. Meeting these criteria is important to the success of any plan, as they will be used to compare against actual performance. In the case of policy-making, for example, the public policy process follows a similar structured approach including the phases of identifying the problem, setting the agenda, implementing the policy, and evaluating the results.
Implementing the control process, whether it pertains to personal goals, business objectives, scientific research, or policy-making, is a dynamic and cyclical activity that involves continuous adjustment and refinement in pursuit of achieving set objectives.