Community Nutrition FCS 3756
Managing Community Nutrition Programs
Management is the process of achieving organizational goals through engaging in
the four major functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
Planning is the forward-looking aspect of a manager’s job, involving setting goals
and objectives and deciding how best to achieve them. Different types of planning
include strategic planning, operational planning, and project management. Project
management, such as the management of the health fair, includes outlining the
project’s critical path, or the series of tasks that take the longest amount of time to
complete.
Organizing focuses on distributing and arranging human and non-human
resources so that plans can be carried out successfully. Organizing includes the
formation of an organization chart to establish lines of communication within the
organization; the determination of the span of control or the number of people one
manager supervises; the analysis of job duties; and the evaluation of performance
through a performance appraisal.
Leading involves influencing others to carry out the work required to reach the
organization’s goals. Leading includes motivating and effectively communicating
with others.
Controlling is the function that regulates certain organizational activities to
ensure that they meet established standards and goals. Two aspects of the
controlling function are financial and information control.
Questions.
1. Describe how your team planned for the nutrition intervention.
2. Describe how your team was organized. Who was the team leader? How were
the duties divided?
3. How was your team ‘led’? How was the team motivated and what method of
communication worked best?
4. A final aspect of management is learning from past experiences (formative
evaluation) and implementing the next project differently. What would you, as a
team, do differently next time?
M. Burns, 2008
