Introduction

This guide covers the daily administration of succession pipelines for HR Business Partners (HRBPs). It explains the tools you use to monitor organizational health, and the workflows you use to maintain an individual succession plan.

Succession Planning Dashboard

The Succession Planning Dashboard is where you monitor the health of every succession plan in your scope. It gives you aggregated data at the top and a granular indicator for each plan.

The stats bar

The stats bar at the top of the dashboard summarizes the succession health of your organization. It surfaces specific risks so you can see where to focus. Common alerts cover low gender diversity within a plan, or a lack of ready now successors for a critical role.

Use the stats bar to decide which plans need attention. You don't have to open each plan to find the ones at risk.

Health indicators

A color-coded indicator gives you the status of each plan at a glance. The colors and the thresholds behind them are configurable, but they always show you how mature a pipeline is and how much risk it carries.

• Healthy. The pipeline has met or exceeded the threshold for viable successors.
• At Risk. The pipeline is approaching a critical threshold and needs attention soon.
• Critical. The pipeline has fallen below the minimum threshold for viable successors.

How the system calculates health

The system calculates plan health in real time. It counts the viable successors assigned to specific readiness states, such as Ready Now or Ready Soon, then compares that count against the thresholds your organization configured.

For example, a plan needs a minimum of 2 Ready Now candidates to count as healthy. If the plan holds only 1, the indicator shifts to At Risk or Critical.

The plan details view

Select a plan on the dashboard to open the Manage Plan view. This is where you do the core work of succession planning, such as identifying talent and managing the metadata for a role.

Plan header and metadata

The header holds the essential metadata for the plan. For a position plan, it identifies the current incumbent. For a role plan, it identifies the associated job role. You also manage plan criticality tags and visibility settings from the header.

Criticality tags in the Manage Plan view

Two criticality tags apply to plans. Use them to mark what matters most in your organization.

• Role criticality tags apply at the role level. The tag appears on every employee profile and every succession plan that shares that role. Use a role tag for a high-impact job category, where any vacancy strains operations.
• Position criticality tags apply to one position plan. Because the tag belongs to the plan rather than the person, it carries over when the incumbent changes. The plan stays marked as critical after the current employee exits.

Personalization

• Favorites. Mark a plan as a favorite to reach it quickly from the dashboard.
• Notes. Add collaborative notes to a plan to capture context that standard data fields don't hold.

Succession and profile notes

Notes let you record qualitative context alongside the quantitative data. There are two types, and the difference matters for data privacy and for who sees what.

Succession plan notes

These notes belong to the plan, not to one person. Use them to document the strategy for the pipeline, a concern about bench strength, or a specific requirement for the role.

Access to succession plan notes is a permission on the succession plan. By default it follows the view plan and edit plan permissions, and you can restrict it for specific personas, including the HRBP, the direct manager, and the indirect manager.

Profile notes

These are the same notes that appear on a Career Hub profile. They belong to the individual employee and follow that employee into every succession plan they appear in.

Profile notes are shared across the platform with any user who can view that person's profile notes. This generally includes HRBPs and the employee's management reporting chain. Use profile notes for a performance observation or a development milestone that belongs to the person's overall career.

Visualize the organization

The dashboard gives you a list. The Org Chart Succession View gives you a hierarchy. It overlays succession data onto the organizational chart, so you can read pipeline health in the context of reporting lines.

For the full documentation, read Organization chart view of succession plans.

Governance and auditing

Every plan has an Activity Log. The log records changes to the structure of the plan, updates to a candidate's status, and changes to readiness levels. Use it to review how a plan has changed over time.

For more about this feature, read Succession Planning: Activity Logging Feature.

Successor comparison

Once you have a pool of potential successors, the Successor Comparison tool lets you evaluate them side by side. Use it for objective decisions and for talent review meetings.

Side-by-side profile analysis

Select multiple candidates from a pipeline to see their key metrics in one view. The comparison covers:

• Readiness levels. See who is Ready Now and who needs long-term development.
• Performance and potential. Compare past performance trends and high-potential indicators across the selected candidates.
• Experience and skills. Identify a gap or a strength between candidates against what the target role requires.
• Mobility and risk factors. Evaluate geographic alignment and retention risk for your top successors.

The comparison view shows you the collective strength of your bench, not just one profile at a time. Use it to decide who to prioritize for a specific leadership track.