Integrated Succession Management

by   |  2 min read
Published :
Shyaam Sunder
Practice Head - HCM

A Necessity in Business Continuity
Succession Management is recognized as an integral part of Business Continuity Planning (BCP). BCP is an interdisciplinary peer mentoring methodology used to create and validate a practiced logistical plan of how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption.

An integrated framework of strategy, event management, and competitive intelligence alone can ensure the necessary continuity.

  • Strategy in Succession Plans: A good continuity strategy should be able to lead the organization through the choices of handling any succession management problem by internal succession, hiring a freelancer/franchise and hiring from the global market.
  • Event Management: Succession plan is viewed as an ongoing process and is executed for positions reaching into the middle and lower levels of management.
  • Competitive Intelligence: It is important for businesses and HR to know how core and non-core positions are being handled and sometimes even be the first mover of a trend in order to gain potential advantages.

Ramco’s Point of View

HR Managers, working on leadership continuity, should be able to help in creating global talent pools and succession plans for specific positions. (Each of these talent pools represents cohorts of employee with specific destinations and succession plans).

There are four singular steps that planners and businesses have to go through while creating the global employee profile and a named destination for the same.

  1. HR Managers can profile candidates based on their education, work experience, and competencies. Basic HR Systems, employee service records, and data from recruitment agencies can help in profiling.
  2. The process has to be tailored to lead HR Managers / Businesses through the process of profiling, based on the candidate’s current work location.
  3. Industry level measures and certification also helps in profiling.
  4. There is a need, however, to establish a strong link between business volumes and headcount (that goes beyond productivity per employee), for designed process to deliver expected results.

Creating an experience…

We argue that practices associated with leadership continuity should be backed by executable, role driven processes that help gather the necessary data for generating the necessary analytics. It is important to interview business and ensure that the “Decisions” entities are mutually exclusive and conditionally exhaustive.

BPEL & Web 2.0

The BPEL technology helps in verifying the candidate information. Web 2.0 technologies can help to compare this information with other documents such as certification, immigration, etc.

Cultural Constructs: An opportunity to co-create

At the level of the organization, and as a fundamental to the process, Succession Managers and Business Heads should blog and brainstorm on the best way to fit a position. Planners work closely with IT solution providers in defining data types and business rules around HCM concepts such as culture and organization’s people semantics. This would enable solution providers to provide the necessary software artifacts so that the planner would co-create an experience (such as succession management) and reconfigure the extant process to suit the needs.

Conclusion

It is important for HR Managers to take a global view of the issues and harness the globally available supports in order to create the experience of choice for business leaders.