Unit 6 Managing Successful Business Project Case Study

Unit 6: Managing Successful Business Project

Introduction: Unit 6: Managing Successful Business Project

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Project management is a very important and integral part of conventional business management, and it is divided into various parts. Talent management is one of them. Talent management is the process of methodically and strategically organizing talent in a way that benefits the firm and also helps in the overall growth of the employee (Ansar and Baloch 2018). The following project management plan will be regarding IKEA, a Swedish furniture brand. The inventory system of the firm has been receiving complaints regarding the increase in waste. According to certain reports, IKEA uses about 1 percent of the natural wood produced on earth. A team consisting of IT experts and operating experts was summoned through new recruitment to look into the matter.

Project Planning

Project Management Plan

The objectives of the project are the reduce waste generation through proper inventory control. Unilever is one of the giant companies in the world with a product range of over 8,500 products and 50 factories across 20 countries. The maintenance of an efficient inventory system requires a lot of stages, however, the particular problem that is being addressed here is the increase in wastage. Unilever makes a profit through margin and not value (Atrizka et al., 2020). The firm has a customer base of 775 million, and the number of products sold in a day is huge hence one can only imagine the extent of management required. The project plan is devised as follows:

• A new team of 10 people is recruited where 5 are IT experts and the other 5 are operating experts. This recruitment is done at the main factory of the firm since it is a first-time venture.
• The IT experts are expected to look after the technical aspects of the inventory such as order, processing, slots, consignments, barcoding and tagging, inventory forecasting, security backups, IoT integration, and so on. Through these, the duty of the IT experts will be to keep an eye on the usage of products, extra raw material should not be brought in so that wastage can be handled along with the reduction of maintenance and transportation.
• The operations team will look after the non-technical portions of the inventory. This will include tracking, keeping an eye on the unused products that have returned to the warehouse, careful waste disposal, and so on(Kravariti and Johnson 2020).

Scope of the project

As mentioned in the previous section the project wishes to control wastage in Unilever to promote cost controlling and sustainable development of the firm. The activities and tasks associated with the plan are two-fold and hence the recruitment that has been performed is also two-fold, one focuses on the technical, and the other focuses on the non-technical aspect of inventory management. The activities will be:

• Understanding and properly calculating the demand of the immediate market of the warehouse depending on how many products still have shelf lives and how many need to be discarded.
• Identifying swifter processes of manufacture so that raw materials need not be stored for longer times increases the costs of maintenance.
• Evaluating the chances of recycling the products that have been discarded off-shelf life. If there are no chances of recycling then how can they be safely disposed of?

Milestones of the project

The overall project has identified three milestones that indicate the working of the plan that has been devised:

• IKEA produces about 590,254 tonnes of waste in a year, the sheer reduction in the generation of waste through measuring it on a quarterly, half-yearly, or annual basis is an indicator of the success of the plan.
• The reduction in requirements of raw materials of certain types will indicate proper recycling ventures taking place.
• Finally, the rate of disposal of the firm the product will be the clearest indicator of the reduction of waste(Claus 2019).

Initiation, planning, and execution

During the manufacturing process of furniture, many pieces of wood are left out of the finished product, these pieces are quite lot in quantity. Careful preservation of these pieces will allow the firm to save them for later:

• Initiation: the initiation will be the identification of the possible potentials that recycling has on the firm, the workers take the effort of keeping the extra pieces of wood aside. These operations need to be supervised by the operations team.
• Planning: the planning portion requires both the IT team and the operations team, spectacular designs out of chipped or used wood can be created on customized designing platforms in 4-dimensional effects. This planning will also help the firm understand the number of raw materials required for the next batch. The operation's team will be responsible for supervising the overall process, keeping track of these extras, maintaining them, and responsibly planning their unusable disposal(Gallardo et al., 2020).
• Execution: the main execution needs to be done by the workers or laborers under the supervision of both these teams.

GNATT Chart

Primary and Secondary Research

Questionnaire

1. What are the main issues of talent management that obstruct a firm from progressing?
2. What do you think can be the ill effects of not managing talent efficiently?
3. What skills should a talent manager have?
4. What should be the basis of the evaluation of talent?
5. Any recommendations for your talent manager?

Comparative Analysis

• Microsoft: Microsoft is one of the leading tech companies in the world where there are almost 124,000 employees recruited per year both internally and externally. The strategy of the firm is to focus more on skills rather than degrees. This technique has been proven sincerely successful for the firm(Nasiri and Bageiry 2020).
• Starbucks: Talent management in this company is very unique. Interviews in this firm are not conducted for a position, rather candidates apply for a vacancy, if they cross the interview round, they are put through training. This training illuminates the skills of each candidate and the firm puts them in a position that suits their skill set.

importance of Talent Management

Talent management is considered to be one of the most important aspects of project management or in the daily processes and operations of any firm. Talent management allows the firm to strategically and methodically put an employee in a position where its maximum potential can be exploited for the benefit of the firm and the employee. An able talent manager focuses on skills rather than qualifications because an efficient skill set is what gets the job done.

In the given case, the recruitment process that has been advised is mixed. The skill set of the technical workers is foxed but the ones handling operations and supervising the plan need to take care of tactically. Every individual has a role to play in the project and each work needs to be carefully understood by the talent manager. The second job of the manager is identifying the skills of the non-technical staff, for example, who is better at communicating and convincing, whose creative side shines the most and such particular tasks need to be given to these people so that the purpose of the same is required(Whyshall et al., 2019).

Findings and Analysis

Reflective Practice

As a talent manager, when I was recruited by IKEA, the primary issue was understanding where exactly this multinational conglomerate was going wrong. It is understandable that the firm is facing issues of sustainability, but I wanted a way that would solve several problems for the firm. The idea of mixed recruitment helped the inventory receive a boost in the form of technical and operative talent. Furthermore, the challenge that I faced here was a division of work among the recruits through understanding the specific skill sets of each of them individually. Second, allotting them their duties and coordinating with them came as the next challenge. Since I am the talent manager, I am accountable for anything that goes wrong in the warehouse; hence, I trained my recruits to keep open communication with each other and coordinate effectively so that the risks of mishaps are minimized.

Conclusion

To conclude, this report discussed the issue of sustainability with IKEA and how effective talent management can aim towards rectifying the issue and creating potential possibilities for new opportunities. The report aimed to show a distinctive breakdown of all aspects of talent management and the relentless division of responsibilities in the firm.

References

Ansar, N. and Baloch, A., 2018. Talent and talent management: definition and issues. IBT Journal of Business Studies (JBS), 1(2).

Atrizka, D., Lubis, H., Simanjuntak, C.W. and Pratama, I., 2020. Ensuring Better Affective Commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior through Talent Management and Psychological Contract Fulfillment: An Empirical Study of Indonesia Pharmaceutical Sector. Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy, 11(1).

Claus, L., 2019. HR disruption—Time already to reinvent talent management. BRQ Business Research Quarterly, 22(3), pp.207-215.

Gallardo-Gallardo, E., Thunnissen, M. and Scullion, H., 2020. Talent management: context matters. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 31(4), pp.457-473.

Kravariti, F. and Johnston, K., 2020. Talent management: a critical literature review and research agenda for public sector human resource management. Public Management Review, 22(1), pp.75-95.

Nasiri, F. and Bageriy, M., 2020. The Relationship among Talent Management, Organizational Intelligence and Entrepreneurship Tendency. The Journal of Productivity Management, 13(4 (51) Winter), pp.173-193.

Whysall, Z., Owtram, M. and Brittain, S., 2019. The new talent management challenges of Industry 4.0. Journal of management development.