Succession Readiness Tracker: Never Scramble When a Key Person Leaves
Map successors to your critical roles, rate each one's readiness against the role's required skills, and track the development actions that close the gap — with leadership approving every slate before it's recorded.
A locked-down web tool where you load your critical roles, candidate pool, and readiness criteria, the tool computes each candidate's readiness per role and shows bench strength, leadership reviews and approves each successor slate, development actions are tracked to close gaps, and you export the full succession plan as CSV — with readiness change tracked over time.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your critical-role list with required skill profiles
- Your candidate pool with current skills
- Your readiness criteria (ready now / 1-2 years / development needed)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Succession planning lives in a confidential spreadsheet that one HR business partner guards like a state secret — and for good reason. It names who might replace your CFO, your plant manager, your lead engineer. It's sensitive, it's political, and it's almost always out of date. The skills columns haven't been refreshed since the last reorg, "ready now" means whatever the last person to touch the file thought it meant, and nobody can actually see how many ready successors sit behind each critical role.
Then a key person resigns, and the scramble begins. Who's next? Are they actually ready, or just the obvious name? What development were they supposed to be getting these past two years — and did any of it happen? You end up making a high-stakes decision from a stale grid, and you find out too late that your "bench" for that role was one optimistic guess. You don't need to live with that, and you don't need to be a developer to fix it.
What you'll build
A tightly locked-down internal web tool. You load three things: your critical-role list with each role's required skill profile, your candidate pool with each person's current skills, and your readiness criteria. The tool scores every candidate against every role they're slated for, classifies each as ready now, 1-2 years, or development needed, and shows you bench strength per role — how many ready successors actually stand behind each key seat. It drafts a successor slate and readiness ratings for each role, then puts it in front of leadership. They review the sensitive picks, adjust, and click Approve. Only then are the slate and ratings recorded. From there you track the development actions for each named successor (and those need approval too), watch readiness change over time, and export the whole succession plan as a clean CSV.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — which roles you consider critical and how you decide, where your role profiles and people-skills data live (HRIS, a learning system, or that confidential spreadsheet), exactly how your skills and proficiency levels are named, what "ready now" versus "1-2 years" actually means in your organization, who is allowed to even see this data, and the messy edge cases like a person on two slates or a role with an empty bench — and then it tailors the data model, the readiness scoring, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through loading your roles, candidates, and criteria, the readiness computation, the bench-strength view, the leadership review-and-approve screen, the development-action tracking, the readiness-over-time history, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your HRIS.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is some of the most confidential data in the company, so it ships with the controls a succession process demands: login so only your team can use it, strict row-level security with deliberately limited access so people only ever see their own organization's data (and you can restrict it further to a named leadership group), a complete audit trail of who viewed, edited, and approved which slate and when, a hard human-approval gate so no successor slate, readiness rating, or development plan for a named person is recorded until leadership signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on role plus candidate so the same person can't be slated twice for the same role. Readiness changes are kept as history, so you can show how a successor moved from "development needed" to "ready now" — and prove the plan is real, not a once-a-year spreadsheet.
Who it's for
HR business partners and senior leaders who own succession planning and are running it out of a confidential, ever-stale spreadsheet. If you can describe how your organization decides who's a successor and what "ready" means, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your first bench-strength view come together the same weekend.