THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT OF TALENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Abstract

In this thesis attention is given to aspects of talent management within projects and is based on the assumption that organisational success depends on the capacity to attract, develop, and retain high quality personnel for specific roles. The project management discipline offers a flexible means of implementing and meeting the challenges of talent management.

Qualitative and quantitative research were used and case studies regarding the effectiveness of projects aimed at managing talent in public sector organisation within three police forces in the United Arab Emirates were examined. In addition to data collected from secondary documents, several human resource managers, talent management managers and team members were interviewed. An initial pilot case study was conducted in the Sharjah Police involving the distribution of 100 questionnaires in different departments.

It is noted that from the perspective of rigorous professional project management, there is no explicit concept of project management of talent management in any of the sample organisations studied in this research. Clearly, this constitutes a major shortfall in project management implementation in talent management which should be addressed by the police forces as well as in other public and private sector organisations.

Despite certain limitations, this thesis does contribute to knowledge on project management and talent management in police forces in the GCC and Middle East. The GCC and MENA region are under-studied areas in the academic and practitioner literature on talent management and the project management of talent management, especially in public sector management contexts.

For future research, it is recommended that a combination of action research and case study research is conducted. Overall, it is concluded that there are no major political or cultural obstacles in developing more sophisticated and functional project management of talent management policies and practices in police force organisations in the GCC and MENA region.