Security_Management

SECURITY MANAGEMENT Security management has a broad range of objectives related to asset protection, physical security, and human resource. It supports in identifying organizations information assets and develop, documentation and implementation of policies, standards, procedures and guidelines. The main role of a security manger can arguably be determined as seven classical functions these include planning, leading, organizing, controlling staffing, co-coordinating and motivating. One of the most important strategies a manager can implement into his or her dept is setting goals or objectives that are realistic, this will give their subordinates a focus on what is expected and how this can be achieved and these objectives or goals should be SMART specific, Measurable/Attainable/Result Orientated and Time specific. In many organizations the Loss prevention dept is a service function so with this in mind it is critical that the credibility and professionalism of all working within it act appropriately at all times whilst interacting with each other and with business partners both internal and external making informed decisions and supporting when appropriate. Commonly within an organizations the security manager reports to the finance or operations director and the relationship between the two is critical so that security matters are given due consideration at board level. An organizations security dept sets out a range of objectives or key performance indicators (KPI’s) and these in turn measure both the dept activity and the impact of the activity upon the organization, they could be assessed as integrity of company stock, equipment or assets, return on investment of security staff and equipment, collating crime trends both internal and externally and measuring dept performance against budgets. Decision making also plays a pivotal role in good security management and quality decisions are vital to the organizations success, to make good decisions it is necessary to define the problem, clarify the objective, then you must collate evidence and in turn look at all the alternatives before making an informed decision. With all these processes in place it then becomes critical that the results are monitored so that future decisions can be made and negative and positives can be absorbed. The ability to be able to communicate and develop relationships with external business partners including local police, national security and crime prevention agencies is also critical to be able to become affective within your organization, by developing and building upon relationships you will then become part of an important structure and will become privy to emerging trends, sharing and learning new security ideas and be informed about local or national incidents that may affect the business as well as becoming a proactive member contributing to meetings. Outsourcing can prove to be a very cost effective way to support your business, security Company’s provide a service that is predominately not regarded as core to an organization. The positives of outsourcing is usually cost, it is usually cheaper to employee contractors as there is no sick pay, holiday pay,national insurance or tax payments on top of a base salary. The flip side to this is that potentially with the contracted guards not being “in house” they could be inflexible, only willing to carry out the duties that they are employed to do, or not carrying out any additional requirements. The SIA was set up in 2003 to help regulate and license individuals in the private security industry and security sector, this has helped small medium and large business drive down losses and operatives interact with the public in a more professional manner. To promote the credibility of the security dept the manager must engage and communicate to all other business partners both internal and external so as to influence their decisions but also be receptive to the values and ideas held by others to be able to come to an agreeable conclusion that adds value to the organization, ideally the head of the dept should be seen as the expert when it comes to their subordinates and be able to answer all enquires, they also need to be seen as trustworthy and credible with an open door policy so that their title does not influence whether they can be approached. All managers need to understand the importance of personal development and the need to revisit some training courses so that they are able to fulfill their role within the organization to their fulfill their potential, the security manager needs to be a leader of the organizations code of conduct and standards, and these must be up held at all times.