Succession planning > Succession planning overview

Succession planning overview

Rival WingSpan offers an objective approach to identifying, assessing, rating and managing the development paths of candidates and incumbents in the context of your succession plans. Rival WingSpan provides succession planners and corporate executives with tools to manage succession plans from an enterprise level, including assessing candidates against identified competencies, and ranking the candidates. Candidates can manage a development plan of appropriate development activities.

Rival WingSpan Succession Planning module allows a Succession Plan Administrator (SPA) to create one or more successions plans and multiple job pools within each plan. Pools can be configured to handle a wide variety of needs that range from a focused single incumbent to a broad multi-job pool.

Candidates for a pool can be identified using a search that includes existing employee fields and new fields that identify risk of loss, relocation, language proficiency, career jobs, potential, promotability, performance and retirement eligibility. Once added to a pool, each candidate can be assigned a pipeline value to indicate readiness for succession.

Candidates and incumbents can be evaluated and compared using a 9-box matrix, side-by-side comparison or scatter plot matrix. Multiple 9-box matrices can be defined to provide comparisons of different sets of data. Matrix configuration options allow the data for each axis to be pulled from the Report metadata or specific employee fields.

When an incumbent or candidate changes jobs, the change is indicated through an alert message shown on the succession plan. The SPA can click the alert to navigate to the pool that needs adjustment.

Fields have been added to the Employee Profile to support succession planning analysis. The Potential tab allows a Direct Manager or HR Rep to manage fields for potential, promotability, performance, risk of loss, and retirement eligibility. It also contains results for appraisal and assessment processes and comparison matrix (9-box) analysis. The Career tab allows the employee to manage fields for relocation, language proficiency and career jobs. And, the Account tab contains fields for gender and ethnicity.

An ad hoc query, using the 9-box matrix, is available for evaluating employees outside of successions plans.