Food Product Development- When people leave.

Food Product Development – a series of posts on tips and advice for developers

Well, it is a sad fact but people do leave business, I find this happens more often with product development/R&D departments than others. Probably because the demand is so high, and after a while the creative juices get a bit stagnant.

So what should you do in preparation for someone leaving your department.

1. Check what your time scale is? is the person planning to take the rest of their holidays before they leave.

2. Split that time into the following areas.

• Try to finish any projects
• Collate information for transfer to another colleague
• Train replacement
• Make needed samples for after they leave (useful to be done with replacement)
• Tidy any storage locations, included in this should be labeling of materials being left.

3. Finish projects,

Where possible these should be finished prior to departure they could be cost saving projects, improvement projects. These tend to be the more difficult projects to handover as people approach them in different ways.

4. Collate information for transfer,

Tidy up those notes, depending on the system you use, typically the best way to do this is to review the active projects you have and make a seperate file for them. This is then given to the replacement, within the file you should have

• recipes
• contact information
• specifications on materials
• comments on assembly
• people within the business you have dealt with on the project
• location of samples or materials

5. Train replacement

This should involve training not a transfer of information, show them the products whilst talking through each recipe. If the trainee is not asking questions are they engaged in the training? Where possible get the replacement to make some of the product, see next section.

6. Make Samples

To take the pressure of the replacement and the business during the transition, a quantity of samples that are likely to be needed should be made prior to departure. This allows customer requests to be filled, it generates a library stock of items for reference.

7. Location of samples of Materials

Depending on leavers time within the business and their tidiness level it is inevitable that they have some materials stored away. This is likely to come in the form of Finish products, competitors samples, raw materials, shelf life, packaging etc. I am always surprised how much I build up over time to the point of Pallets of material.

Prior to the person leaving this should be tidied, all not essential material for transferred projects should be dumped. This prevents confusion later. Where possible materials should be identified to match the handover file. I.e. Box 29 is the Sausage project.

8. Check impact on team

Depending on the person and the role, this change could make a significant impact on the team dynamic. Spend time thinking about this as you may need to take actions short term to support the team. My suggestion always provide a format for the team to say goodbye, if the person provided a core leadership role, talk to other team members to help fill this void.

9. Prepare for the new person in the team.

I will write more about this in another post.

The above steps should lead you to a successful changeover of persons and should result in the minimum impact on your department

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