A succession planning template you can actually keep updated

The five columns every template needs

Strip away the consulting layers and a working succession plan answers five questions per role. Anything beyond this is decoration until the basics are filled in.

• The role. Not the person. Roles outlive the people in them, and a plan organised by person falls apart the moment someone moves.
• Is it critical? Would the work stop, a client notice, or a system go unowned if this seat emptied on Monday? If not, it does not need a successor named.
• Who could do it. A named person, not a job family. One name is a plan with a single point of failure; two or three is coverage.
• How ready they are. Ready now, ready in a year, or ready with development. This is the column that turns a list of names into a decision about who to invest in.
• What is missing. The specific gap between where the successor is and what the role needs. Without it, "ready in a year" never becomes ready.

Vacancies belong in the template too

Open positions are the most common blind spot. In a spreadsheet, an unfilled role is usually an empty row that nobody scrolls to. Treating a vacancy as a real box in the structure, with an empty name field, keeps the hole visible in every review instead of quietly disappearing from the plan.

Two views worth adding

Once roles and successors exist, two views do most of the analytical work in a succession conversation.

• A nine-box. Performance against potential, nine cells. It shows who is in the top-right corner and therefore who your named successors realistically are.
• A coverage matrix. Which parts of the business each person actually covers, and where coverage is claimed but nobody is behind it. This is where single points of failure surface.

Why templates go stale

The template is rarely the problem. The friction is. A spreadsheet forces you to redraw the structure by hand every time someone moves; an HR platform makes you wait for an admin seat and a data import. Both mean the plan gets refreshed once a year, for a meeting, and then ignored.

Org-Planner is the same template as a working tool: one offline HTML file where the org chart, critical roles, successors, readiness, nine-box, and coverage matrix all live together. You edit it in a browser, it saves to your machine, and updating it after a reorg takes minutes instead of an afternoon. There is no account and no server, so nothing about your people ever leaves your laptop.

If you want the tooling side of this, see succession planning software without the platform.