Management and Leadership

• What is a management plan?
• How do you evaluate and adjust a management plan?
• Why does your organization need a management plan?
• How do you develop a management plan?

Whether your organization is a one-person volunteer operation or a multi-program giant with dozens of staff, it needs a management plan to make sure that it operates smoothly and gets everything done. The plan for a tiny organization can obviously be a lot simpler than that for a huge one, but the intent in both cases is still the same: to carry out the mission of the organization and the day-to-day tasks needed to support that mission and keep the organization running as effectively as possible.

What is a management plan?

A management plan is a blueprint for the way your organization is run, both day-to-day and over the long term. It includes the standard methods for doing various things -- handling money, dealing with the actual work of the organization, addressing the way people in the organization do their jobs -- and the overall philosophical and intellectual framework in which these methods operate.

The management plan for your particular organization depends on a number of factors:

• What is the organization trying to accomplish? A neighborhood initiative that exists to achieve a single goal -- keep a historic building from being torn down, preserve a piece of open space, build a playground -- has very different management needs than, say, a health clinic that plans to serve the community for years. Issues that are both important and ongoing for the clinic (staff pay and benefits, for instance) may simply not exist for the other organization.
• What actually needs to get done day-to-day to keep the organization running? The actual tasks that keep the organization alive, maintain its standing with funders and the community, and allow it to accomplish its goals, need to be carried out efficiently and on time. Who's responsible for that, how many people will it take, and what are the mechanisms that will allow it to happen for your particular organization?
• What degree of freedom do people at all levels of the organization need in order to do their jobs well? If nothing can get done without going through several layers of management, the organization isn't going to be very effective.
• What are the resources available for carrying out a management plan? How many administrators could the organization support, given its finances? If the answer is one (or one part-time), your management plan will look very different than it would if the answer were three.
• How does the management plan fit in with the mission and philosophy of the organization? It's important, both for the internal workings of the organization and for the way it's viewed in the community, that there be consistency between what the organization says about itself and the way it runs. If an organization claims to be democratic, but keeps its staff totally powerless, it is not only violating its own principles -- and thereby making it less likely it will accomplish its goals -- but also compromising its reputation.

Why does your organization need a management plan?

Granted, a lot of work goes into keeping an organization going. Why can't it just get taken care of as it comes up? Why go to the trouble of creating an actual plan for just doing what needs to be done?

The general answer here is that your organization is too important for you to leave things to chance. If there's no plan, everyday tasks may fall through the cracks, emergencies may arise with which no one knows how to cope, responsibilities may not be clear, and--the bottom line--the work of the organization may not be done well or at all. A good management plan helps you accomplish your goals in a number of ways:

• It clarifies the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the organization so that everyone knows what she and everyone else is supposed to do. Staff members know who they need to go to for information, consultation, supervision, etc. They also know what the boundaries of their own positions are -- when they can do something without checking with someone else, and when they can't.
• It divides the work of the organization in reasonable and equitable ways, so that everyone's job is not only defined, but feasible.
• It increases accountability, both internally (when something doesn't get done, it's obvious whose responsibility it was) and externally (the better the management of the organization, the better it will serve the community).
• It ensures that necessary tasks are assigned to the appropriate staff members, and creates a time schedule to get them accomplished. Bills get paid on time, staff members are where they're supposed to be to provide the organization's services, funding proposals get written and submitted, problems are dealt with, and the organization functions smoothly as a result.
• It helps the organization define itself. By developing a plan that's consistent with its mission and philosophy, an organization can be clear on what it believes in and communicate this with clarity to its staff, its target population, and the community as a whole.

Source: The Community Tool Box, https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/leadership/effective-manager/management-plan/main
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.