Succession planning is one of the hottest topics these days among CEO’s and senior executives. A combination of factors including a wave of pending retirements, global expansion and an increase in merger activity have raised the visibility of the succession planning process to that of "mission-critical" within most firms. Unfortunately, not all HR departments have adjusted their approach to meet the rising expectations. I have found that a majority of current succession plans have serious design flaws, in part because many of the individuals involved in developing these succession plans are relative newcomers to workforce planning. The net result is that many succession plans exist only in the simplest organizational chart format, which fails to meet stated program goals and deliver comprehensive metrics.  If you would like to develop an effective set of metrics, the following checklist may help guide that effort.

Checklist for Assessing Your Succession Plan
Succession plan effectiveness measures can be broken into two basic parts and five groups. The first part covers usage and the essential design features, while the second part measures indications of plan success, its business impacts and plan failures.

One question that consistently emerges in every conversation about human resource technology is whether I advise organizations to leverage best of breed solutions or more comprehensive packaged solutions from a single vendor.

Like all good advisors, the off the top of my head response is: "Good question! the answer is it depends...".Technically, I understand that the answer truly does depend on the complexity of the organization planning to implement the technology. Factors like industry, size, global dispersion, management philosophy, and growth strategy really do play a significant role in limiting how a technology will empower and interact with the organization.  However, were you to get a few glasses of wine in me, my answer would almost certainly always be "best of breed."

Single vendor solutions offer numerous advantages, as do best of breed of solutions.  For me, the real issue behind this question is one of effectiveness versus efficiency. Single vendor solutions are able to develop and market an attractive product for the masses because they focus on providing technology that enables the lowest common denominator of activities across a broad spectrum of organizations. This design approach has a lot of advantages, such as streamlined workflow, unified data methodology (enables more robust analytics off the cuff), consistent user experience, and cost efficiency.  Unfortunately it comes with a few downsides that are just too big for me to overcome, the biggest being lack of flexibility.

One of the most frequent questions that I get from HR professionals is "How do I prove the ROI of HR to senior executives?" Although it's a topic that I have covered in several articles and in my metrics book, there still seems to be a great demand for information on the topic.  As a result, I've put together a quick guide on the best ways to demonstrate the dollar impact of each of the major HR programs.  Incidentally, before selecting any particular measure, it is critical that you run the idea by your CFO or senior executives, so that you don't waste a lot of time on a measure that they don't think is credible or that they care little about.

Calculating ROI is relatively straightforward, it's the dollar amount that the program generates minus the costs of the program divided by the costs of the program.  In effect, ROI demonstrates how much the program’s benefits exceed the program’s costs.