Worklogix Blog

Category: Succession

  • Highlights of SAP Successfactors Succession for 2H 2025

    Learn what’s currently available for Succession with the 2H 2025 SAP SuccessFactors Release. The updates will be in production November 14-16.

    For greater details, you can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog.

    For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here. 

    Here are some of the highlights of the release for Succession.

    Show Person-Based Nominations on Talent Card and People Profile

    An employee’s nominations from all their employments, including nominations to positions and talent pool nominations will be available on the Succession talent card. For this view, Global Assignment or Concurrent Employment must be enabled and in Nominations Setup, select “Show person-based nominations for employees with global assignments or concurrent employments”.

    Then users with proper permissions can view all nomination records of an employee.This will provide a extensive view of nominations across multiple employments for an employee.

    Succession Card Nominations for Multiple Employment

    Nominations will also display on the legacy and latest People Profile.

    Nominations in People Profile

    Access Inactive Employees in Talent Pools Based On Target Population

    There is a new setting which enables access to inactive nominees in an user’s target population for talent pool nominations permissions. In Nominations Setup, enable “Include inactive users in target population of talent pool nominations permissions”.

    This enables inactive employees to be visible in talent pools while applying target population.

    When the setting is enabled, Inactive employees in the target population appear in:

    • Talent pools
    • Position card in the Talent Pools section
    • Talent card in the Talent Pool Nominations section
    • Latest People Profile in the Talent Pool Nominations card or in the legacy People Profile in the Current Nominations block
    • Talent search results for talent pools

    Admin Tool Matrix Grid Rating Scales Universally Available

    The Matrix Grid Rating Scales admin tool is now available in all systems. Before the update, it was available only when the Matrix Grid Reports feature was enabled in Provisioning. Removing the restriction, the tool is now available for matrix grids on the Performance Management form and those in the Trend Information and Overview blocks in the legacy People Profile.

    Enhanced Suggested Successors Feature

    The Suggested Successors feature now supports using the skills and competency proficiency levels from Growth Portfolio. Users may also view a role readiness explanation for each suggested successor.

    Role Readiness Explanation

    The attributes required by the position’s role are grouped into two sections: “matched” and “unmatched”. The grouping is ased on whether the suggested successor’s current ratings meet the expected ratings of these attributes.

    Filter Position Tile View with Foundation Objects

    Foundation Objects can be used to filter position tiles displayed in the the Position Tile view.

    This requires the setting to include Foundation Objects in filters and adding Foundation Object fields as searchable fields to the Position object. Then Foundation Objects will show up as available filters in the Position Tile view.

    Adding Foundation Type Filters for Position Tiles

    In Succession Settings, enable “Include Generic Objects and Foundation Objects in filters in the Position Tile view”.

    Separate Permission Control for Viewing Nomination History

    Role-based permissions can now be used to control whether users who can nominate successors or view talent pool nominees are allowed to access the history of successor or talent pool nominations. This provides more specific access control over nomination history data.

    Succession Planners permissions to view nomination history is now separate from Succession Planning Permission and View Talent Pool Nominations permissions.

    Child permissions have been added:

    • View Nomination History, which allows users who nominate successors ability to view the nomination history on the position card, Succession talent card and in the People Profile
    • View Talent Pool Nomination History, which allows users who view talent pool nominees to also view the nomination history in the talent pool details page and the People Profile
    Permissions Needed

    If a user already has Succession Planning Permission or View Talent Pool Nominations parent permission, the corresponding nomination history permission is automatically granted.

    Sort Succession Org Chart by Position or Employee Title

    Additional sorting options are now available for same-level nodes in the Succession Org Chart. In addition to the incumbent’s username, can be sorting can also be done alphabetically by position title or employee title.

    Succession Org Chart Sorted by Position Title

    The title-based sorting is helpful when comparing succession plans for similar positions or roles. The order remains the same when incumbents change.

    To enable this sorting:

    MDF or legacy position-based nomination method

    In the Org Chart Configuration>Succession Org Chart, “Sort Succession Org Chart by position title” is selected

    For the role-person nomination method

    In the Org Chart Configuration>Succession Org Chart, “Sort Succession Org Chart by employee title” is selected

    AI-Assisted Successor Recommendation

    If you have purchased AI units license, are using Talent Intelligence Hub and enabled Growth Potential, succession planners can use the power of AI generative capabilities to view a list of recommended successors based on their skills, competencies, and work experience.

    With the Suggested Successor setting enabled, weights can be configured for skills and competencies and work experience.

    Successor Recommendations Settings

    When settings for both are set, generative AI uses the following data to recommend successors:

    • Position-related job families, roles and profile in Job Profile Builder
    • Skills and competencies in the Growth Portfolio
    • Job information and external work experience in People Profile

    In the Suggested Successors list, hover over an employee and use the Add button to nominate them as a successor. Once the employee is nominated, they are removed from this suggested list. Users can also choose the information icon to view why the employee is suggested in a popover dialog. The dialog contains up to four sections:

    Detailed Successor Recommendations

    For greater details, you can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here.

    Do you need help implementing or supporting your SAP SuccessFactors system?  Contact info@worklogix.com for assistance, download our support services brochure, or visit https://www.worklogix.com/implementation.html for additional information.

  • SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2022 What’s New in Succession and Career Development

    SAP SuccessFactors 2H 2022 What’s New in Succession and Career Development

    SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the second half of 2022.

    Preview release was on October 28 and production will be released December 9th. You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog.

    For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here. 

    For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2H 2022 Succession and Career Development below.

    Succession

    On the Succession side of the house, the Succession Org Chart and position tiles received a functional enhancement to now be able to show the Job Title, Job Level, and Department in the header of the position tile. The options to turn these on is in the Org Chart Configuration screen in admin tools.

    Enhancements to Calibration

    There have been multiple enhancements to calibration sessions that impact Performance as well as Succession and Development. Specifically, you can now remove subjects from all calibration sessions where before you could only remove from inactive or setup statuses.

    Additionally, there’s been enhancements to the enforcement of distribution guidelines so that more guidelines enforcement scenarios are supported when more than one session is finalized at a time. Specifically, you can now include more than one rating in the guideline, you can use operators other than “=”, and not all ratings may have a guideline. Before, these were only supported when you finalized sessions individually.

    Reporting

    Multiple new options are available in reporting on the Succession and development modules as well. The Career Worksheet is now available in Story Reports.

    Mentoring data is also available now for Story Reports and Cross Domain Table Reports. This can be helpful for example if you wanted to cross domains of employee profile with mentoring to see which departments have mentors and mentees and which do not.

    Career Development

    SAP continues to catch up the old features of the old development module with the new look and feel.

    Development Goals

    For example, you can now copy goals from an old plan again. The comments feature is also now available in the latest goal management on the goal details page. In addition to Development Goals, this feature is also available for performance and 360 forms. To use this, you must add the comments field in the XML.

    Career Worksheet and Career Explorer

    The Career Worksheet now visually shows the gaps between target and actual competency levels for a role.

    The career explorer is also generally available now with AI powered recommendations. It provides a hierarchy career path that allows for recommendations the employee may not have thought of pursuing based on career moves of people similar to them and/or roles from outside their hierarchy. The feature can also be a data source for the new opportunity marketplace.

    You can also see why the system made such recommendations:

    Mentoring

    You can now add Country/Region as a matching category criteria for mentors and mentees. This option comes available so long as you have the country/region standard field setup in your data model.

    Wrap Up

    We have now covered the highlights of the Succession and Career Development related updates for 2H 2022.

    Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles?  Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

  • SAP SuccessFactors H1 2021 Release Updates for Succession

    SAP SuccessFactors H1 2021 Release Updates for Succession

    Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

    It’s finally here! As of April 9, 2021, SAP has released the documentation for the H1 2021 release.  The preview release will be April 16 and the move to production will be May 21st.  You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here.  New to the release process? For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here. 

    In this release, we saw a wide range of enhancements across the Talent modules – some specific to Succession and others that lay across the modules but help out succession planners. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Succession module below!

    Succession Management Specific Changes

    Let’s start with what’s new just for Succession Management before we take a look at some general talent improvements that are relevant to Succession.

    Nomination History

    The main new feature exclusive to Succession Management is the ability to view nomination history in the talent card and in the people profile. Users will with Succession Planning permission can click a history icon on these screens to see a list of positions for which the employee has been nominated and information about the nomination history for each including the date, nominator, readiness level, status, change type, and notes. The information includes deleted nominations as well.

    Nomination History View

    Hide Pending Nominations for Talent Pools

    Succession configurators have had the ability to hide pending nominations from succession planners for some time now, but the ability was only extended to position nominations. Now, this feature works for talent pool nominations as well. This configuration setting remains in the same in Admin Center -> Nomination Setup.

    Form-Based Nomination Deleted

    Another update specific to succession with this release is that form-based succession nomination will be completely deleted as of May 21,2021. This was a legacy method of approving nominations – if you never used it, then don’t worry because no action is required. If you are still using forms to approve nominations, you have little time left to switch to the newer permission-based method!

    General Talent Management Updates Relevant to Succession

    There are also numerous updates across the talent modules in general that affect not only Succession, but also Performance, Goals, Development, and/or Calibration. Let’s take a look at these briefly below.

    Editing Talent Info Directly on a Talent Card

    It seems like every customer for whom I’ve implemented Succession has asked why they need to switch between the employee profile view and other views to edit talent information. Why can’t customers just change the information right on the talent card that shows up across the different views that contain the talent card? This way data like impact of loss or risk of loss can be updated when the user has the contextual information they need to make the decision. Well now, customers can!

    Users can now click the icon shown below to open a popup that allows these fields to be changed.

    Editing Information on a Talent Card

    My Jobs Downloads

    Previously Succession (and other talent reports) could be downloaded from the Scheduled Reports page in Classic View. Reports may now be downloaded from My Jobs page within Report Center. This eliminates the need to switch to Classic View prior to downloading.

    A report with multiple files can be downloaded in a compressed .zip file or downloaded individually.

    Numerous Calibration Session Improvements

    There are a variety of calibration session feature that have been added/updated as well. For example specifying default facilitators or allowing managers to more easily create calibration sessions for their teams. For more information on these improvements, check out our blog on What’s in in H1 2021 SAP SuccessFactors Calibration Release.

    That’s a Wrap!

    That’s all of the updates for H1 2021! We hope you found this blog informative!

    Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles?  Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

  • SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder Talent Management Integration

    SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder Talent Management Integration

    SAP SuccessFactors Job Profile Builder (JPB) is a tool used to create and maintain job profiles associated to job roles. Job profile content can be used when creating job requisitions but it can be used for much more. JPB is integrated with many HCM modules and the key that ties all of these modules to Job Profile Builder is job roles.

    The job profile components can be used in many modules. These components are useful in many areas of SuccessFactors including:

    • Performance Management
    • Career Development
    • Succession
    • Employee Profile

    First, let’s look at a job profile. Job Profiles are tied to job roles within a job family. The profile can include education, skills and competencies to associate with a job role. This information can get pulled into a req and the position associated with a job will inherit its properties.

    An example of a job profile is shown below.

    Job Profile

    Competencies are a very critical component of a job role. The competencies are selected from a competency library, most notably the SuccessFactors 2.1 Competency Library. Once the job roles are created, competencies are selected to map to roles. Positions associated with a job will then have these competences that can included as requirements on a job req or a way for an employee to track progress on goals.

    As you see below, for a role, a competency library is selected and then competencies can be added.

    Mapping Competencies to a Job Role

    Job codes, skills, competencies and talent pools can be mapped to a job role. Job codes associated with the roles will inherit the skills and competencies. An example is shown below.

    The job role below has a job code, 8 competencies, 4 skills and a talent pool mapped to it.

    Job Role with Mappings

    This means that all positions associated with a job code will then have the associate skills and competencies.

    Performance Management
    Any job related competencies can be included on performance form template. This allows an employee to be rated on their job specific competencies.

    When a form is generated, all competencies associated with the employee’s role will be pulled in when a performance form is generated.

    Role Competencies on PM Form

    Development Goal Plans

    Development goals can have have competencies added. This is especially useful when using Career Worksheet which we will look at next,

    Competencies on Development Goal

    Career Worksheet
    The Career Worksheet is a component of Career Development and is used by an employee to discover development opportunities based on roles that may wish to grow in to. The Career Worksheet is also dependent on job roles and their job role definitions, mapped competencies and expected competency proficiency ratings.

    Job profiles will appear throughout the career worksheet, when browsing roles, viewing suggested roles, viewing career paths to name a few.

    The employee selects future or targeted roles to view along with the job role’s associated competencies. The worksheet identifies competency gaps which highlight development areas that the employee needs to work on.   The worksheet also illustrates how ready an employee is for the targeted role based on their competency proficiency. The worksheet may also be used to view career paths and suggested future roles.

    Competency mappings to roles are the sole source of competencies listed on the career worksheet. Only ratings from completed forms are displayed in the career worksheet.

    A job role will require a number of competencies and each competency should have an expected proficiency level rating. An employee’s readiness for the role depends on whether the employee’s proficiency rating for the competencies meets the expected ratings.

    The system uses the Career Worksheet readiness cal­culation to compute a competency match score which compares the em­ployee’s competency rating with the ex­pected rating for the role.

    An employee can browse career paths and suggested roles from their Career Worksheet. Employees can proactively prepare for that next step. By discovering the competencies and skills needed to exceed in a job role, the employee can create development goals that align with a targeted role. This gives employees a sense of empowerment to develop skills, behaviors and competencies to prepare for future roles.

    Suggested Roles

    Suggested roles can be based on career paths or through an algorithm based on a set of criteria. The suggested roles can be a combination of competencies, targeted roles, career path and roles selected by peer. Clicking within any role will will display the job profile, Selecting a role will add it to the employee’s career worksheet in order gauge their readiness for the role.

    Suggested Roles

    Clicking the plus sign will add the role the employee’s career worksheet.

    The employee can view job roles based on job family. Selecting any will add the role to career worksheet.

    View

    Career Path

    Once a target role is selected, the career path for the role can be viewed. This gives the employee a chance to see the job role progression. Job profiles for the roles in the path may be viewed as well.

    On the Career Worksheet, the job profile of a targeted role may be viewed.

    Career Path for Target Role

    All of the job roles that have been configured for a career path will display. The targeted role will be highlighted. Clicking on the information icon give the employee a view of the job profile which can be used to help them decide if that is a job they may like to grow into.

    Job Profile

    Role Readiness Form

    The Role Readiness form is launched from the Career Worksheet by the employee and is used to rate how proficient they are in the competencies needed for any future roles that they selected.   The form is used to help employees plan their career development and identify areas of  development needed for the future roles. 

    Role Readiness Form

    Readiness Meter

    Once the form has been completed, the readiness meter on the career worksheet will show how ready the employee is for the targeted role.

    Readiness Meter

    Gap Graphs

    There is a gap graph for each competency comparing the last competency rating of record for the employee with the expected rating for that role. All job roles mapped to a competency will be included.  The graph shows the actual competency rating from the latest rating form against the expected rating for the competency.

    For any large gaps for the competencies, the employee may decide to add a development goal to help them become more proficient. This will add the development goal to their development plan. The development goal will also show the linked competencies.

    Succession

    Job roles can be tied to talent pools. When a talent pool is mapped to a job role, all positions tied to the job code will then become members of the talent pool. Talent pools associated with a position display in the position card when accessed from the Succession Org Chart or Position Tile view.

    An employee’s talent card will also show the talent pools their position is associated with as seen below.

    Talent Pool on Talent Card

    The Position card will also show talent pool successors.

    Position and role information may be viewed as well. Within the Succession Org Chart, when viewing a position, the associated job role details may be viewed. Clicking ‘View Role Details’ will open the job profile associated with the role.

    Role Details

    Employee Profile

    The skill profile is linked to JPB.

    Employees can add skills whick can be used for employee development and succession planning,

    Skill Profile

    Conclusion

    I hope you can see that Job Profile Builder can be used beyond Recruitment. The job profiles created can be extremely useful in developing the people within your organization and not just for finding new talent.

    For more information on the Job Profile Builder and Talent Management Integrations, check out our book here!

  • COVID-19 Threatening your Business Continuity? Try Succession and Development to Promote Internal Mobility.

    COVID-19 Threatening your Business Continuity? Try Succession and Development to Promote Internal Mobility.

    opened brown door
    Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

    With so many jobs lost, we all need to hunker down and concentrate on keeping our current jobs until things get better right? Nothing could be further from the truth!

    Realizing the Need

    Just last week, I had a call with a customer who wanted to re-examine their Succession Management process. They had the system set up. They didn’t really use it. Then COVID hit. Like many companies, the organization underwent a lot of changes and left a lot of resource gaps. Now they are realizing they could have been better prepared and are looking to quickly ramp back up their succession process. They are not alone.

    Throughout this year, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on HR.com‘s advisory board for Internal Mobility, Succession, and Career Development. The organization just recently published the results of the cross-industry study we board members helped create. From what I see, the survey results are consistent with what I am seeing in the example I described above. Let’s take a closer look at the facts!

    First off, most organizations recognize they don’t have an effective succession management and/or planning process in place. In addition to only 40% of companies agreeing or strongly agreeing that their process is effective as shown below, another survey question revealed that only 26% have a succession management system in place.

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    Furthermore, the survey also found that only about 1 in 5 companies have considerable job mobility within the organization.

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    At the same time, companies realize that business continuity (e.g. keeping the lights on!) is the most important reason to promote succession management and internal mobility.

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    Recognizing The Gap

    So let’s get this straight, companies recognize that Succession and Internal Mobility are important, but they don’t currently have good systems and processes in place to support them. So why don’t more companies get their Succession Management systems and processes up and running? The problem is, most organizations don’t consider Succession Management important to the organization.

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    The gap here is that the process really is important for the reasons these companies have already realize and just not acted up (remember what we said about keeping the lights on?). And many companies right now are starting to realize this the hard way during COVID as employees leave both voluntarily and involuntarily and large resource gaps are being felt because of this process gap. I can only attribute this trend to “perception” since the facts point to a real need here. I think it is time to end this perception!

    Is It Worth The Investment?

    If I invest in a Succession and Development Management strategy, is it really going to work? The answer is “Yes!” The survey found overwhelmingly that those organizations who are internal mobility leaders, it is easier for employees to move to new positions. Making it easy for employees to move from one position to another makes it easier to fill critical roles with people your organization already knows and trusts rather than going through the expense and risk of recruiting externally (which many companies are still unable to do at all at the moment with some still experiencing hiring freezes).

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    OK, I get it, I need Succession and Internal Mobility! How do I get started?

    There’s a ton of ways! We’ve talked a lot about Succession Management – which involves tagging which roles are critical to the organization and identifying how to fill those roles. This can help you define who to develop and what they need to develop. But of course, that means investing in employee development itself! Not surprisingly, the survey found a similar trend here. Almost half of companies reported they did not have a development process or program!

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    What’s more frightening, is that during the Pandemic, when the concentration should be on developing the fewer employees many companies are trying to make more effective, the opposite seems to be happening. 47% of companies saw decreases in employee development.

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    At the same time, employee demand for development opportunities has increased! 75% of companies saw that employees are looking for development opportunities!

    Source: HR.com’s Internal Mobility Webinar Nov 5, 2020

    Once again, there is a huge disconnect which helps explain further why many company strategies are out of alignment with the needs. Only once employees are able to develop their skills and competencies in order to meet the needs of critical roles will they will be ready to start filling those critical roles.

    There are a lot of specific strategies companies are using the promote internal mobility and fill their succession management strategies. To find out more information about the different approaches companies are taking to implement their Succession and Development Strategies, you can download the full survey at HR.com or contact info@worklogix.com to talk more about your strategy!

    For more information about Succession Management and other talent management modules in SAP SuccessFactors, check out our book here!

  • What’s New for Succession and Development in H2 2020

    What’s New for Succession and Development in H2 2020

    As of October 9, 2020, SAP has released their documentation for the H2 2020 release.  You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here.  As a reminder, preview release will be October 16 and production will be released November 20th.  For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here.  For tips on how to manage a release, check out or blog here.  For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2020 within Succession and Development below!

    Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor for Job Profile Builder

    The biggest news for these modules we’ve seen is that the Job Profile builder now supports the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor (see below).  This was a big gap that is finally being closed.  We had some customers who wanted to use both the Job profile builder and the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor.  This required creating all of the content for the Coaching Advisor and Writing Assistant in the legacy competency library config screens and then switching on the Job Profile builder and hoping everything got converted OK.  If there was a mistake somewhere or something you wanted to add to the Coaching Advisor or Writing assistant…well then there wasn’t a way to fix it without turning off the Job Profile builder.  Now this gap is closed and a profile job profile builder compatible maintenance screen for the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor exists.  Woohoo!

    Writing Assistant

    Talent Search

    Another significant enhancement we’ve seen is to the talent search.  Now at the top of the screen there’s a checkbox to toggle between AND/OR logic when searching for background information (see below).  We are wondering how this compliments / replaces the “Make All Criteria Optional” button that already existed under the settings menu.  You can also add up to 6 criteria within each background element.  There’s also a new competency picker in the talent search.  The export feature was also enhanced to allow you to reorder and choose which fields can be exported.  More fields can also be exported now under Advanced Information and Ratings & Competencies.

    Talent Search Showing New Check Box for Before and After

    Calibration

    Calibration sessions got a neat enhancement where you can now view comments from other calibration sessions so long as they use the same template (see below)!  We can see this becoming very useful to organizations that manage multiple sessions across large organizations.  This was also enhanced in the Odata API where a new object, “CaibrationSubjectComment”, is available so that these comments are exposed for interfacing.

    Calibration Comments Between Sessions

    In addition, you can also use autocomplete when searching for people in calibration.  Also, if you are attempting to purge a user who happens to be the only facilitator for a session you can now replace the user with an active user and then continue with the purge.

    Career Worksheets and Career Explorer

    Within Career Worksheets and the Career explorer we’ve seen some nice usability improvements.  For example, the ability to remove recommended roles in the career explorer.  Users can now remove a recommendation if they no longer wish to see it.  This is a nice feature that can help encourage employees to keep looking for other roles instead of just constantly throwing something irrelevant at them.  Aside from this, the career worksheet also got a security enhancement where the worksheet is only viewable if the employee is in the user’s target population.  The progress bar also swapped colors as shown below.  The bars will also show up now for not applicable / too new to rate competencies (they were hidden before).

    Before:

    After:

    But that’s not all!

    Development templates and Continuous Performance Management also got another integration point.  Now when a user

    Matrix views (9-box) also got visual /usability updates.  For example, you can now remove the “Too New to Rate” option.  You can also view the people cards for employees even when you are zoomed out of their box.  You can also select reporting levels in the Matrix Grid Report.

    You can now also hide contingent workers in the Succession Org Chart.  The “Add Successor” icon also appears now even when there is no successor exists.

    Talent pool nominations can also now be approved or rejected.  Nomination history for talent pools is also available via the Odata API and People Analytics Stories.

    All in all, there’s over 25 items being changed/enhanced in this release and we didn’t cover every detail here.  For more information, check out the What’s New Viewer here.

    Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles?  Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

  • Highlights of the 1H 2020 SAP SuccessFactors Release for Succession

    Highlights of the 1H 2020 SAP SuccessFactors Release for Succession

    What’s New in Succession?

    With the SAP SuccessFactors First Half 2020 release there are six updates in Succession. There are four new features and two enhancements. Let’s start with Talent Pools.

    Talent Pools

    There are two new features and some minor enhancements for Talent Pools.

    The two new features are:

    1. View Nomination History for Talent Pools
    2. View Talent Pool Nominations in People Profile and Talent Cards without Talent Pool Object Level Permission

    The Talent Pool enhancements involve filter fields and the Nomination Table.

    Now let’s look closer at each starting with what’s new for Talent Pools.

    View Nomination History for Talent Pools

    This new universal feature permits those with Talent Pool permission to see nomination changes for nominees within a Talent Pool.

    In prior releases, there was no nomination history available to view within a talent pool.  Now users with Talent Pool role-based permissions with assigned target populations may see the nomination history for employees in a talent pool.

    Within a talent pool, there is new icon used to view nomination history for each nominee. The example shown below identifies the icon which displays on the top right side of the talent pool table.

    View Nomination History Icon

    Talent pool nominees that have nomination change history for this pool will display in the “Nominees” section that displays on the left side of the page.   Click on any nominee name from this column and their nomination change history for this talent pool will display.

    An example is displayed below.

    Talent Pool Nominees with Nomination Changes

    The name of the user that made the change will display along with the change date. The readiness, status, nomination source and notes for each change are displayed as well.

    Approved and Removed nominees will display their nomination history.  You must click the checkbox for “Show Removed” in the nominees section to see any employees removed from the talent pool. Both Approved and Removed nominees will display as seen below. The default view is approved nominees.

    Approved and Removed Nominees with Nomination Change History

    To see the nominee’s talent pool history for another date range, click the “Date Range” calendar icon that is available on this screen. An example is shown below.

    Modify Date Range for Nomination History

    The default date range is one year from the current date. The date range may be modified and then the nomination history will display for the new date range

    We will now look at the other new feature for Talent Pools.

    View Talent Pool Nominations in People Profile and Talent Cards without Talent Pool Object Level Permission

    It is now possible to enable users without Talent Pool object level permission to view Talent Pool nominations of employees in People Profile and Talent Card.

    This new feature may be used to enable managers to see this information for their direct reports in  People Profile and Talent Card.

    This is a provisioning opt-in.  The setting to enable is “View Talent Pool nominations in People Profile and Talent Card without having the Talent Pool object level permission“.

    Provisioning Opt-In

    When enabled, users without Talent Pool object level permission may view Talent Pool nominations for employees within:

    • Nomination Block in People Profile
    • Nominations section of Talent Card

    In addition to these two new features, there is also an enhancement for Talent Pools that we will look at next.

    Talent Pool Enhancements

    There are a few enhancements to talent pools. Let’s open a talent pool to see what’s changed.

    Talent Pool Nomination Table View

    First, there are more lines available in a talent pool nomination table view as seen below. This update also includes making the line width consistent with tables in other modules.

    Updated Nomination Table for a Talent Pool

    Notes Column Placement

    There is an additional display field option as well. Users may modify the position of the Notes column. Let’s see how it’s done.

    Within the talent pool, click on the “Define Column Properties” icon as noted below.

    Define Column Properties Icon

    A pop up displays the available fields that may be included in the talent pool view. When the cursor is place on “Notes“, the upward and downward arrows may be used to change placement of this field. 

    Define Talent Pool Column Properties

    Clicking “OK” and the nominations in the Talent Pool will now reflect the changed column order as seen in the figure below.

    Nomination Table with Updated Notes Column Placement

    The final enhancement to Talent Pools involves selected filters.

    Talent Pool Filters

    First, the selected filters can now be automatically cleared after all nominees are deleted from a Talent Pool. Looking at the example below, the filters were defined by clicking “Adapt Filters“.

    Select Fields to Appear on Filter Bar

    Here is where the filters are defined. The fields to use as filters are selected and will appear on the filter bar within a talent pool.

    In the example shown below, there is a filter to display nominees with a readiness of 1 to 2 years.

    Talent Pool Before Nominee Deletion

    After the final nominee is deleted from the talent pool, the readiness filter is cleared as seen below.

    We have now seen all of the updates for Talent Pools. Let’s see what else is new in Succession.

    Exclude Nominees from Seeing Themselves within a Succession Plan

    This is an admin opt-in setting that when enabled, prevents users nominated as successors to see themselves in a succession plan. This will also prevent them from nominating themselves. This means that users with permission to do Succession Planning for certain positions won’t see themselves within the succession plans of those positions.

    Let’s see how to enable this feature. Go to “Nominations Set Up”. Scroll to the very bottom of the screen and enable “Exclude nominees from seeing themselves within a succession plan”. The “Nomination Set Up” page is shown below.

    Nomination Set Up Feature to Enable

    This exclusion prevents nominees from nominating themselves. Additionally, the nominees would not see themselves in Succession Org Chart, Position Tiles, Lineage Chart, Talent card, People Profile, Presentation and Nomination History from position card.  A Talent Search would not display them or a list that they are a part of.

    There is one additional feature that we will now explore.

    New OData API Function Imports for Succession

    There are two new OData API Function Imports for Succession:

    • approveSuccessors
    • rejectSuccessors

    These function imports may be used to approve or reject nominees that are in a pending status.

    In prior releases, third-party applications could only read the Succession nominations in Pending Approval status.

    The two new function imports allows third-party applications to write the approval steps of the nomination workflow.

    The role-based permissions needed for both function imports is: Succession Planners>Succession Approval Permission.

    Approve Nominees in Pending Status

    Pending status for approvals are:

    • Change Pending
    • Pending
    • Approval Pending

    Parameters for approval and rejection are nomineeIds (mandatory) and comment (optional).

    NomineeIds use semicolon between multiple ids.

    example: https://<API-Server>odata/v2/approveSuccessors?nomineeIds=’101;102;103’&comment=’testapproval&#8217;

    Rejecting Nominees in Pending Status

    Pending status for rejecting successors are: 

    • Change Pending
    • Pending
    • Deletion Pending

    example: https:///odata/v2/rejectSuccessors?nomineeIds=’100;101;102’&comment=’test&#8217;

    Now we have seen what’s new in Succession, let’s see the final enhancement.

    Picklist Label Enhancements for Matrix Grid Report and Talent Pools Overview Page

    In previous releases, picklists used for filter fields in the Matrix Grid Reports and Talent Pool Nominations overview page showed option IDs rather than labels.

    Matrix grid reports support custom filters and these filters may be associated with a picklist. If this is the case, the picklist labels will be displayed in the customizable fields. Picklists that are used for filter fields of the Matrix Grid Reports and Talent Pools nominations overview page will now show labels instead of option IDs. A custom picklist with values for a talent pool filter is shown below.

    Talent Pool Filter with Values

    These fields also remember the picklist labels that were chosen the last time.

    Wrap Up

    We have now seen the new features and functionality for the Succession module. Check out my blogs on Highlight of 1H 2020 Release Updates for Calibration and Career Development too.

    Do you need help supporting or implementing your SAP SuccessFactors Succession module? Contact us at: info@worklogix.com or download our support services brochure.

  • How Can SAP SuccessFactors Help Me with My Succession Planning Process?

    How Can SAP SuccessFactors Help Me with My Succession Planning Process?

    I recently watched the The King on Netflix, a very well written (mostly borrowed from Shakespeare) movie which begins with the topic of Succession as a young King Henry V rises to the throne.  As my work day progressed the next morning, this got me thinking more about the topic of Succession (although a much less intense version of it).  I like to think of Succession Planning as the crowning achievement of a well-functioning Talent Management system.  In my mind, the ultimate goal of a Talent Management system is to help people grow.  This is really the core function of every component or module of Talent Management systems.  Talent Acquisition systems empower people to find a new opportunity within the company and get their foot in the door.  Goal Setting and Development plans give people a place to set the tangible targets they seek to obtain.  Performance management systems help coach people on obtaining those goals.  Learning systems give them the knowledge they need to get there.  And finally, a good Succession Planning system helps people at the top use all of the information gathered during all of these activities to see who is ready to move on up!

    What’s Included?

    A typical SAP SuccessFactors Succession Management module implementation covers the below processes:

    1. A Talent Review process including 9-box placement
    2. Talent Search
    3. A Succession Org Chart
    4. Presentations

    There are even more features in the module, but for the sake of brevity I won’t cover them all this article.

    Talent Review Process

    While a formal Talent Review process is not necessary for Succession, it can be a very helpful starting point.  To me, it marks the difference between an organization that takes Succession seriously as an open part of its culture vs. one that keeps the topic of Succession completely behind closed doors.   Formalizing the process forces managers to stop and take the time to think about their direct reports, identify who is ready for advancement, and how to cultivate them for the future.

    To help with formalizing the Talent Review process, SAP SuccessFactors offer an out-of-box Talent Review form.  The form consists of a 9-box placement and comments section where managers can place each of their direct reports for which a form is launched.

    Sample Talent Review Form

    In addition to a talent review form, calibration sessions can also be utilized to gather the “big picture” of resources from different major areas of the company and decide on 9-box placement amongst larger groups of participants in the planning sessions.  Calibration sessions can also be used to determine key flags for resources as well such as “Risk of Loss” and “Impact of Loss”.

    Calibration Session 9-Box

    Talent Search

    Another way to search across the company for people flagged as for Risk of Loss or Impact of loss—or any other talent field for that matter, is the Talent Search.  This is the one-stop-shop for all talent info on your employees!  Things like past performance ratings, skills and languages and degrees pulled from the talent profile are all here as well.  Talent pools can also be made with the search results to help you organize your talent!  There are all sorts of practical applications for Talent Search – for example in the search query I have made below, the results would show me all of my Good to Excellent performers for this year who are also willing to relocate—great information to have on hand when you have a critical position that is empty in a hard to fill location!

    Talent Search Criteria
    Talent Search Results

    In addition to adding resources to talent pools, from here you can also nominate them for positions and also compare how well they stack up against one another in your search (is it just me or do Francois and John look related?)

    Talent Search Comparison

    Succession Org Chart

    The Succession Org Chart is where it all comes together!  Here you can navigate by position or by resources along the reporting chain and nominate people for positions.  Clicking on a position shows you details about what Successors are in queue for the position.  Clicking on a resource shows their “Talent Card” which can be customized to show a variety of talent information stored in the system from the various modules.  You can even nominate successors from the candidate pool in recruiting!

    Succession Org Chart – Detail of Talent Card

    The linage chart can also help with scenario planning, showing how a potential move could affect the downstream positions.

    Lineage Chart

    Presentations

    Phew!  I’ve had a full year from conducting all of those talent reviews, talent searches, talent pools, and succession nominations, how about you?  Oh no, now the big boss wants a presentation with all of this new data tomorrow morning!  Luckily with the presentations feature, I won’t have to dig through all that data, throw it into spreadsheets, and copy / paste it into a power point deck!  The feature comes with several pre-build slides where you simple choose some selection criteria and you can build things like 9-boxes and team views and pull up talent cards for employees using live data in interactive slides!

    Creating Slides
    Detail of 9-Box Slide with Talent Card

    I love it!  When is the right time to deploy?

    As you might imagine from the description given in the introduction, I typically see companies get the most benefit from their Succession Planning system after all or most other components of the system have been implemented.  This is because decision making is all about having the right up-to-date relevant information to keep you well informed – and in this case it is all of the data from all of those other modules that helps tell you who your high-potentials are and when they will be ready for a move.  For example, the talent search functionality works best when resources have filled out their talent profile with things like education and skills – and the talent profile is often easiest to maintain if it has already been pre-populated when the employee was hired from the recruiting system using their candidate profile.  Logically it is also best to establish a performance/potential matrix after you have evaluated everyone’s performance in the system. Further indicating the “right time” to deploy SAP Succession Management, there comes a point in a company’s growth when the Talent Director and/or Managers have had enough of their paper or excel-based Succession planning processes.  If a Director or Manager of Talent is growth themselves, they will need to focus on strategy and growth instead of spending all night re-arranging people on excel spreadsheets.  At a certain number of employees working within the company, the process simply becomes too burdensome to do manually.  If you are at that point now, I’m sure you are eager to get started with all of the features I’ve described here

    For more information about Succession and other talent management modules in SAP SuccessFactors, check out our book here!

    Do you need help with your SuccessFactors Succession Implementation? Contact us at: info@worklogix.com

    Worklogix Worklogix partners with clients to plan, configure, develop and integrate HR products and custom applications. We have assembled a global team with years of experience implementing HCM solutions. Our team is dedicated to understanding your business challenges, helping you leverage your technology and implement solutions that deliver results.