ELI5: What is Succession Planning?
What happens if the team captain gets sick on game day? Succession planning makes sure there’s always a trained backup person ready to step in for any important role, so the team can keep playing.
Definition
Succession planning in the context of business continuity ensures that critical roles and responsibilities have designated backups who are trained and authorized to step in if key personnel become unavailable due to illness, departure, travel, or a disaster event. Without succession planning, the loss of a single key individual can become a business continuity failure — particularly for specialized roles like CISO, system administrators with unique access, or executives with signing authority.
Key Details
- Addresses personnel as single points of failure: if one person holds unique knowledge or access, they are a SPOF
- Key succession areas: executive leadership (CEO, CISO), IT operations roles, security team, and any role with unique system access or knowledge
- Succession planning includes: identifying backup personnel, cross-training, documenting processes and credentials, and ensuring backups have necessary access rights and authority
- Succession plans should be tested by rotating responsibilities during exercises or planned absences
- Exam tip: succession planning is a personnel resilience control; it directly addresses the human SPOF risk identified in the BIA
Connections
- Parent: business-continuity — succession planning ensures personnel resilience within the BCP
- See also: single-point-of-failure-spof
- See also: documentation