SumTotal® Succession

Find and Develop New Leaders

Maintaining great talent in your organization is tough. Grooming new talent for leadership or minimizing risk by having someone fill a vital position takes insight that can border on clairvoyance. You need to find internal candidates with the right talents and skills and then develop them to be ready when you need them. It’s not simple or easy, and when you are managing hundreds to thousands of employees, it can be overwhelming.

SumTotal Succession, part of the SumTotal Talent and Development Suite, enables you to eliminate risk and drive careers by using smart searches, assessment surveys, human insight, and targeted development to ensure your company has the talent for future deliverables and strategy.

Find Successors/Build Careers

Finding a needle in a haystack is nothing compared to finding your next leaders years before they are ready to lead. SumTotal Succession enables HR staff to create rules-based searches based on employee attributes, including performance ratings, experience, tenure in the position, and willingness to relocate. Succession candidates can then be compared side-by-side to enable better decision-making.

Searches can be either dynamic and based on the most current data or created in snapshot mode to capture a point-in-time view of talent. Succession pools can be populated using searches, manager nominations, or hierarchy relationships. Once created, those queries are sharable either as individual searches or as part of query pools. Since successor data is sensitive, all searches have security to limit what a user can query and the results they see.


Minimizing Risk with a Dynamic Talent Pipeline

Succession planning is all about supply and demand. The better you can gauge your need for talent, the more successful you’ll be in meeting that need. Succession Assessments provide a flexible tool to assess job satisfaction, flight risk, and a host of other variables. Combining the results of these assessments with each employee’s system stored career path enables management to understand the state of their talent pipeline and make necessary adjustments to ensure readiness for unexpected changes or fulfilling strategic growth.

Multiple surveys flow into the overall Talent Assessment. Integrating different sets of assessment data enables the HR team to monitor all important talent factors and profiles to give a comprehensive view of talent readiness, as well as uncover flight risks, enabling management to address risks before it’s too late.

Decision Tools to Plan for Any Future

SumTotal Succession provides tools to enable managers and HR professionals to manage more than just succession. Using the position-based org chart view allows managers to perform analysis and plan for acquisitions, reorganization, or divestments, tracking new or open positions against planned organizational structures. Using these position-based hierarchies supports planning and visibility for multiple scenarios and circumstances.

SumTotal also addresses successor redundancy where organizations have false bench strength due to top performers listed in multiple succession plans. Once one of these successors is promoted or leaves, the organization leaders scramble to find new successors. Fortunately, SumTotal provides impact analysis tools to uncover these potential issues before they materialize. This enables managers and HR to track both named successors against positions to maintain bench-strength visibility and allow managers to monitor the status of nominees before promoting them to be successors.

SumTotal Succession supports traditional 9-box calibration along with configurable calibration matrices such as Flight Risk vs. Flight Impact, Performance vs. Compa-ratio, and over 20 additional views.

Benefits

  • Identify at-risk positions
  • Calculate and view bench strength
  • Model the future state of your organization
  • Make better talent decisions with calibration tools
  • Publish and share talent searches
  • Perform what-if analysis for reorganizations

Feature Highlights

  • Drag and drop 9-Box and N-Box calibration tools
  • Sharable talent searches
  • Succession assessment surveys
  • Talent assessment summary
  • Capture and search for employee competencies, skills, certifications, and experience from talent profiles