| Course | NR 703 Applied Organizational and Leadership Concepts |
|---|---|
| Week | 2 |
| Paper type | Organizational structure analysis |
| Length | About 1,100 words, 6 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | MSN, Nurse Executive |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NR 703 Week 2
Organizational Structure Analysis: Following One Night Nurse's Request to Start Report Fifteen Minutes Early Through Every Stop It Reached
Student Name
College of Nursing, Chamberlain University
NR 703: Applied Organizational and Leadership Concepts
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Organizational Structure Analysis: Following One Night Nurse's Request to Start Report Fifteen Minutes Early Through Every Stop It Reached
The Request
In March 2024, a night nurse on the telemetry unit asked whether night and day nurses could overlap by fifteen minutes, from 06:45, so that bedside report could happen before the medication pass. The request went to the night charge nurse in an email. What happened next shows the unit's structure better than the organizational chart does.
The Path, Drawn
| Stop | Role | What the stop added | Days at this stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Night charge nurse | Agreement; forwarded the request | 2 |
| 2 | Unit manager | Interest; asked the staffing office what it would cost | 21 |
| 3 | Staffing office manager | A cost estimate: 15 paid minutes for about 7 night nurses a day, about 640 hours a year | 14 |
| 4 | Director of nursing, medical-surgical | A courtesy notice; no reply recorded | 30 |
| 5 | Payroll | Nothing; the request never reached it | |
| 6 | Unit manager again | A note in the unit's improvement list: "revisit in budget cycle" |
The request reached four stops in about 67 days and stopped. No one said no. The last action was a note in a list, and the night nurse who sent the request was never told what had happened to it, which is itself a structural fact worth recording: the path had no step that reported back to the person who started it.
What Each Stop Added
Each stop either added something to the request or simply passed it on. Two stops added something: the charge nurse's agreement and the staffing office's cost estimate. One stop, the director's, existed only to be informed; it added no decision. The unit manager's second appearance added a deferral. In structural terms, the director's stop is formalization without authority: a rule that requests involving paid time be shared upward, with no expectation of a response. Mintzberg's distinction between the operating core, the middle line and the strategic apex helps here (Mintzberg, 1979): the request began in the operating core, stalled in the middle line, and the apex was informed but never asked to decide.
Span of Control, as Arithmetic
The unit manager has 62 direct reports: registered nurses, nursing assistants and unit clerks across both shifts. If the manager spent 15 minutes a quarter with each, that would be about 15.5 hours a quarter, or roughly an hour a week, on individual contact alone. The manager also attends about eight hours of meetings a week and covers staffing gaps. A request needing the manager's follow-up competes with 61 other people's concerns and every meeting. The 21 days at stop 2 are what that span looks like from the bottom.
The night charge nurse has no formal reports but coordinates about seven nurses and three assistants each night. The staffing office manager covers eleven units. Each wide span adds time at each stop.
The Dotted Lines
Not every reporting line is a solid one, and the dotted lines matter most for requests that cross departments. The unit's clinical nurse specialist reports to the director of nursing practice, not to the unit manager, but works on the unit two days a week and leads its quality projects. That dotted line could have carried the request to a different part of the structure, the practice council, which sets policy on report. It was not used, because the request was framed as a staffing question, not a practice one, and staffing questions go to the manager. A second dotted line runs from the night charge nurse to the house supervisor, who manages hospital-wide staffing overnight. The supervisor could have raised the request at the supervisors' morning meeting with the staffing office, but the request was sent by email during the day, when the supervisor was not on duty, and that route was never tried either.
What the Official Chart Shows Instead
The organizational chart shows the unit manager reporting to the director, the director to the chief nursing officer and the clinical nurse specialist to the director of nursing practice. It shows no staffing office, no payroll and no practice council, because those are support functions drawn on a separate page. A request that needs paid time touches three boxes that are not on the unit's chart, which is part of why nobody on the unit could predict where it would go.
Why the Path Went This Way
The request asked for paid time, so it entered the structure as a cost. Costs travel up the line through the manager and the staffing office. Had it been framed as a patient safety request, supported by audit data, it would have traveled through the clinical nurse specialist to the practice council, which meets monthly and has authority to recommend changes to the report policy. The structure did not reject the idea; it routed it according to how it was framed.
A Claim That Can Be Checked
A structural reading is only useful if it predicts something. If the same request were sent today through the clinical nurse specialist to the practice council, with audit data showing 11 of 50 bedside reports at 07:00, it would receive a decision within two council meetings. That can be checked: the council's minutes record every item and its outcome. Week 4 will show that something similar happened in 2026. Report location shapes culture as well as structure, since what staff see done at the bedside teaches newcomers what matters (Schein & Schein, 2017), and the evidence that bedside report benefits patients is what a practice framing would have carried (Sand-Jecklin & Sherman, 2014).
What the Structure Would Need to Carry a Request Like This
A route for requests that are both practice questions and cost questions. At present each request must choose one door: staffing or practice. A request that needs paid time to improve practice falls between them. Some hospitals handle this by having practice councils review the cost of their recommendations with finance before forwarding them; this hospital's council has no such link. Naming the missing route is a structural finding, and it explains why the 2024 request had nowhere to go even though everyone who saw it agreed with it.
What the Analysis Leaves Out
Why the night nurse did not follow up, and why the manager's "revisit" never happened. Those are questions of culture and incentive, which later weeks address.
References
Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research. Prentice-Hall.
Sand-Jecklin, K., & Sherman, J. (2014). A quantitative assessment of patient and nurse outcomes of bedside nursing report implementation. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 23(19-20), 2854-2863. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12575
Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.
NR 703 Week 2 instructions, in plain terms
Draw the path a single request takes through the organization, early in the paper, and mark each stop by what it adds: a signature, a cost check, a courtesy notice or nothing at all. Give the days spent at each stop. Then give structural names to what the path shows, such as formalization without authority. Work span of control out as arithmetic rather than describing it. Name the dotted lines and whether they were used. Compare the path with the official chart. Explain why the request traveled the way it did. End with a claim someone could check against records, so the analysis predicts something rather than only describing.
Inside the NR 703 Week 2 example
The sample's table follows the overlap request from the night charge nurse, two days, to the unit manager, 21 days, the staffing office, 14 days with a 640-hour cost estimate, and the director, 30 days as a courtesy notice, ending in a note to revisit. Mintzberg's operating core, middle line and strategic apex locate the stall. Span of control is calculated as about 15.5 hours a quarter for 15-minute contacts with 62 reports. The clinical nurse specialist's and house supervisor's dotted lines were unused. The chart omits the staffing office and council. The missing route for practice requests that need money is named, and the claim is that a council-routed request would get a decision within two meetings. It also notes the night nurse was never told what happened to the request.
NR 703 Week 2 rubric: what full points look like
Structure analyses lose most when they reproduce the official organizational chart and describe it, which tells the reader nothing about how work actually moves. Next is span of control mentioned as a phrase rather than worked out as numbers. Many analyses never follow a real request, so delays and dead ends stay invisible. Dotted lines are often left out, though they explain why some requests move and others do not. Analyses that blame individuals for a stalled request miss the structural finding. Ending without a claim that could be checked leaves the analysis as description rather than explanation. Analyses that never mention whether anyone reported back to the person who made the request also miss a revealing gap.
NR 703 Week 2 help from the desk
Following one request through an organization usually means piecing together emails and asking people what happened to it. With the request's history in hand, we can draw its path, mark what each stop added and work out span of control as arithmetic. We can also help you identify dotted lines, compare the path with the chart and write a claim that can be checked. Choosing a request that stalled rather than one that succeeded often reveals more structure. The analysis is yours. Recording whether anyone reported back to the requester is worth doing too.
Get a NR 703 Week 2 example written to your instructions
Send the Week 2 assignment page and the rubric, plus the request you want traced if you already have one in mind. A structure analysis written to your instructions comes back within 24-48h, free the first time. Say whether your classroom wants a drawing embedded or attached, since the two versions are laid out differently.
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NR 703 Week 2 questions, answered
What if my organization has no published chart?
That is workable and sometimes better. Build the path from what people actually do: ask who has to be told, who has to sign, and who can stop it. A structure assembled from observed routing is stronger evidence than a diagram somebody in human resources drew four reorganizations ago, and most rubrics accept it if you say where it came from.
Is this the same as a workflow map?
No, and the difference costs marks when it is missed. A workflow map shows the steps of a task. This paper shows where the say-so lives, which is a claim about the organization rather than about the task. Two units can run the identical workflow and differ completely in who is allowed to interrupt it, and that difference is the subject here.
Does the drawing need software?
Rarely. A clean hand drawing photographed straight on is accepted in most classrooms, and boxes made from a table in your word processor work too. What gets graded is whether every stop is labeled and whether the labels match the prose. A beautiful diagram with unexplained arrows loses more than a plain one with a legend.
Where can I find a free NR 703 Week 2 sample paper?
This page holds the full structure analysis following a report overlap request through every stop it reached.
What does span of control look like in the NR 703 Week 2 analysis?
With 62 direct reports, fifteen minutes a quarter each would take about 15.5 hours, which helps explain why the request sat 21 days with the manager.