The project aimed at developing a system to manage the development of young university graduates and equip them with the experience and skills necessary for integrating them in the company workforce. The case study focuses on three sections. The first section addresses the development of the Proof Of Concept (POC) that aimed at creating a prototype that was then enhanced in terms of its functional capabilities and data management tasks to meet the set objectives. The second section addresses how the POC was transformed to a fully functional multi-user system that was later utilized by all the divisions within the company. The third section touches on how the experience obtained was later used to help in building a unified system for the oil and gas sector in the country. The case also discusses the challenges, measures, and counter measures taken to address them, and the lessons learned to ensure the project was delivered to stakeholders.
TopCurrent Challenges Facing The Organization
In brief, the challenges faced by EDC were mostly of control nature as the company was keen to manage the flux of young graduates on one hand and enable the HR division to administer the development plans of these graduates in a systematic and efficient way.
Eight challenges were identified at the beginning of the project and these were classified into two categories. The first category related to the administration of the process from the HR division point of view and that had the following challenges ranked in descending order according to their criticality to the business and their importance.
The first challenge was the lack of a methodical approach, where HR division heavily relied on processes applied by different divisions and that most of the time lacked critical details. In fact, the HR division was mostly facilitating training sessions while the divisions were dealing with graduates on case by case basis.
The second challenge was the difficulty of establishing a unified framework (including the identification of unified templates) for defining and classifying competencies, while the third challenges related to the complexity of defining the competencies at macro (EDC) and micro (divisional) levels.
The fourth challenge of this category was of course the need to establish a pan company standard for competencies that are common to all divisions including but not limited to the administration, formal communication, networking, and IT skills.
The remaining challenges were related to EDC management and were directly linked to the above challenges. They included the difficulty in obtaining feedback from stakeholders prior to having a systematic tool that enables the users to test the suggested solution. The second challenge was the problems expected due to the lack of clarity of the details, where what could work for some divisions may not necessarily be acceptable to the other ones and that of course would raise issues from management once the details are explored / addressed. The fourth challenge was the resistance expected from many users who could see this as a threat (in all divisions).