Succession Planner

What this tool does

CM8-266 is a working succession plan. You list the roles your organisation cannot run without, name who holds each one and who could take it over, score how exposed each pairing leaves you, and record the development that turns a hopeful name into a ready one. The tool ranks the roles by exposure, shows where the pipeline is thin, tracks the development commitments to their target dates, and prints a report fit for a board, an owner, an investor or a lender's management-risk question.

One row is one role–successor pairing. A role with nobody behind it is still one row — with the successor blank and readiness set honestly to “none identified”. That blank row is the most important one in the register.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind — which matters, because a succession plan names people and records candid opinions about them.

Succession is risk management, not org-chart art

Succession planning has a reputation as something large organisations do to grids of executives. Strip the ceremony away and it is continuity risk management: for each role whose sudden vacancy would hurt, how likely is the vacancy, how badly would it hurt, and what stands ready behind it? Those are the same three questions a risk register asks — likelihood, impact, control — applied to chairs instead of events.

The highest exposure is rarely the fanciest title. In the sample plan the Managing Director's succession worry is the Operations Director, who is retiring — but the largest score in the register belongs to the CNC programmer: every program on the shop floor passes through one person, nobody is behind them, nobody could even hold the fort, and nothing is written down. The org chart says the directors matter most; the exposure arithmetic says the business stops fastest somewhere else entirely. That correction is the whole point of scoring rather than guessing.

Identifying critical roles

Do not try to plan succession for every job — plan it for the ones that pass at least one of three tests:

• Does the business stop? If the chair is empty for a month, does output, cash or compliance visibly suffer? That is the criticality question, and it is about the role, not the person's seniority.
• Is the knowledge concentrated? A role becomes critical when one person holds relationships, system access or know-how that exists nowhere else — regardless of where it sits on the chart.
• Is the market scarce? A role you could refill in three weeks is less critical than an identical role that takes nine months to hire for. Scarcity multiplies every other problem.

Score criticality as high when the business stops or suffers fast, medium when the gap is painful but manageable for weeks, and low when it is coverable. Most organisations find eight to fifteen roles clear the bar; a register of forty is an HR filing exercise nobody will review.

Scoring incumbent risk honestly

Incumbent risk asks how likely the chair is to actually empty: a stated retirement window, visible flight signals, health, a spouse's relocation, a market that headhunts the skill weekly. Score it high when departure within a year is likely, medium when a move within two years is plausible, low when the person is settled. Score what you know, not what you fear — and update it when the facts change, not when the annual review comes round.

There is a courtesy issue here worth stating plainly. A succession plan can read as if people are stock to be replaced, and a plan run in that spirit leaks that spirit — usually to the very people it scores as flight risks. The honest framing is the opposite: planning for someone's departure is how you make their holiday, promotion or retirement possible without drama, and developing a named successor is one of the more concrete investments you can make in that successor's career. Keep the register candid and keep it confidential; do neither and it will cause the departures it predicts.

The readiness bands, and what “ready now” actually requires

Ready now means the successor could take the role next month and the business would barely wobble — because they have already done the job's hard parts, not merely worked adjacent to them. Covered the chair for real absences, taken the difficult decisions, faced the customer or the auditor alone. Sitting beside someone for five years is proximity, not readiness.

Ready in 1–2 years means the gaps are known, specific and closable — the register should say exactly what they are. Ready in 3+ years is a genuine development project: right person, long road. None identified is the honest answer more often than registers admit, and this tool treats it as data, not shame — it is the setting that drives the exposure score upward until someone acts.

Development that closes real gaps

The development field asks what actually stands between the successor and the role — then the action field asks what you are doing about it, and who owns that it happens. The developments that work are transfers of real responsibility: acting up during the incumbent's leave, delegated ownership of a budget line or an account with genuine authority attached, leading a negotiation with the incumbent observing rather than the reverse. Courses have their place for credentials and technique, but nobody becomes ready in a classroom.

An external hire pipeline counts too. If the honest plan for a role is “we would recruit, and we know the market, the salary and the likely lead time”, write that as the action — it is a legitimate answer, provided the lead time is survivable, which is exactly what the emergency-cover field tests.

The tool refuses a target ready date with no development action behind it — a date without a plan is a wish — and the commitments table tracks every recorded action to its target, flagging the overdue ones.

Emergency cover is a different question

Succession asks who takes the role permanently. Emergency cover asks who holds the fort for three months, starting tomorrow. Firms constantly blur them — “D. is the successor” quietly becomes the answer to both — but they need different qualities: the successor needs the capacity to grow into the role; the emergency cover needs to already know enough to keep it upright, even badly, even part-time. Sometimes the same person answers both. Often not: a retired predecessor, a group colleague, a contractor, the manager one level up. The field exists because the two questions get confused, and the tile counts high-criticality roles where the emergency answer is blank — those are the vacancies that turn into crises in week one, not year one.

Documenting the knowledge

The knowledge checkbox records whether the role's critical knowledge is captured outside the incumbent's head: procedures, key contacts, system access and the process for recovering passwords, where the bodies are buried in the contracts. It is the control that still works when every plan fails — the successor falls through, the emergency cover is on holiday too, and the business is left with whatever was written down. A day of documentation is the cheapest succession insurance you can buy, and the tile shows what percentage of your roles have bought it.

The exposure score

The score multiplies the three judgements so that a weakness in any one of them drags the whole number up: a stable incumbent does not excuse an empty pipeline, and a ready successor does not fully neutralise a likely departure. The bands are deliberately blunt: 18 and above is red — act this quarter; 9 to 17 is amber — a live watch item; below 9 is acceptable for now. Like any scoring scheme it is structured judgement, not measurement — its job is to force the comparison between roles that would otherwise be compared by seniority and sentiment.

Review cadence

Twice a year is the workable rhythm for most organisations, with an immediate update whenever the facts move — a resignation, a retirement conversation, a successor's own departure. Each row carries a last-reviewed date and a status; mark rows needs re-review when you know they have drifted. The succession board table is the meeting agenda, pre-sorted by exposure: start at the top, ask what changed, check the development commitments actually happened, and reset the dates. A register reviewed annually for the auditors is decoration.

Confidentiality

This register records who might leave, who is not ready, and what you privately plan for both. Read by the wrong person, any line of it can do damage. Because the tool runs entirely on your machine and uploads nothing, the register is exactly as confidential as the computer and the exports you make from it — keep exported files off shared drives, limit printed copies to the people in the review, and consider initials rather than full names if the file must travel.

FAQ

Should people see their own succession entries? The register itself is usually confidential, but the development plan inside it should never be a secret from the successor — it is their career plan. Tell them what they are being developed toward; keep the risk scores private.

What if the honest successor answer is “we would hire externally”? Record readiness by the realistic lead time — an external hire for a scarce role is rarely better than “1–2 years” once search, notice and onboarding are counted — and write the hiring plan as the development action.

Can one person be the successor for two roles? Yes, and the register will show it — which is the point. Two rows naming the same successor is a pipeline with a single point of failure of its own.

Is a high exposure score a criticism of the incumbent? No. The score measures the organisation's dependence, not the person's performance — the best people generate the worst scores, precisely because they are hard to follow.

The incumbent and the emergency cover are the same person — is that allowed? The tool will not stop you, but it means nobody holds the fort if that person is the one who left. Find a second name, even an imperfect one.

Saving your work

Roles, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo. A succession plan is personal and commercially sensitive at the same time — protect exports accordingly.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic here is deliberately simple and the tool does it faithfully. Everything that matters sits underneath it: whether the critical roles are the real ones, whether the risk scores reflect evidence or anxiety, and whether the named successors could actually do the jobs. A plan on file is not a pipeline — readiness is proven by delegated responsibility, real cover performed and real decisions survived, not by an entry in this register.

Employment terms, notice periods, retirement rules and what may lawfully be recorded about employees differ by country. This is a planning and prioritisation aid, not employment, legal or tax advice, and no decision about any individual should rest on this register alone.