Succession planning is planning who will take over key tasks once the person currently performing them stops doing so – on departure, promotion, long-term sick leave, or retirement. In smaller companies the risk tends to be highest, because critical knowledge is often held by a single person and is not recorded anywhere. The first step is to identify which activities depend on one person and what impact their absence would have. Substitutability follows: writing down procedures, training a second person, and rotating tasks, so that cover is not just on paper. For leadership positions, this is supplemented with a development plan for possible successors, prepared with sufficient lead time. This is a topic that gets postponed until the problem materialises, at which point the solution tends to be the most expensive.
See also: Mentoring in a company, Employee turnover and exit costs, AI for Knowledge Base Management.
