Succession Planning Phase II

Succession planning is an organizational investment in the future. Institutional knowledge is a critical ingredient in the culture of an organization, and its intangible value becomes significant when an organization is faced with the need to pass this knowledge to a new generation of leaders or employees in key positions. An exploration of the current situation in the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) was undertaken during Phase I of this project, which resulted in the development of three recommendations for future action. This Phase II report details the findings related to two of those recommendations: focusing effort on reducing vacancy rates within the Planner Series and establishing a Senior Mentoring Program within DelDOT. The analysis of current, successful DelDOT efforts to recruit Engineers and the availability of Planner programs at regional institutions of higher education resulted in the development of a conceptual model for Planner recruitment. Utilization of this model should directly address vacancy rates in the Planner series. Regarding the establishment of a Senior Mentoring Program within DelDOT, the research findings highlight best practices regarding mentoring programs among comparable organizations. This project also produced the wholly unexpected result of discovering that a mentoring program already existed within the agency – but that it had not been utilized by the staff of the Planning Department. On the whole, this project directly illustrates the practical benefit of applied research. The recommendations that have been developed could be implemented in short order. 1

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Sponsor Organizations:

  Delaware Department of Transportation

  P.O. Box 778
  Dover, DE  United States  19901
• Project Managers:

  Reeb, Ralph

• Performing Organizations:

  Delaware Center for Transportation

  University of Delaware
  Newark, DE  United States  19716
• Principal Investigators:

  Tuttle, Doug

• Start Date: 20060701
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20070630
• Source Data: RiP Project 17667

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Program management; Research projects; Transportation planning
• Uncontrolled Terms: Mentoring; Succession management
• Geographic Terms: Delaware
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Highways;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01459910
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Delaware Department of Transportation
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 1:15PM