Succession Planning for Procurement Departments

02 September 2025, Iain C. Steel

Despite its strategic importance, many procurement departments lack a robust succession plan. This oversight can expose organisations to significant risks when key personnel leave or when shifts in business strategy demand new skills and leadership.

Succession planning is the proactive process of identifying and preparing individuals to assume critical roles within an organisation. For procurement teams, this involves not only ensuring leadership continuity but also safeguarding institutional knowledge and maintaining supplier relationships.

Why Succession Planning Matters in Procurement

Procurement is a strategic function that drives value, innovation, and competitive advantage. Modern procurement professionals are expected to navigate complex supply chains, manage risks, and contribute to ESG and social value goals. When key personnel leave unexpectedly, the ripple effects can be significant. Here’s why succession planning is essential:

1. Mitigating Knowledge Loss
   Procurement professionals often hold specialised knowledge about supplier relationships, contract management, and compliance requirements. The sudden departure of a key individual can result in the loss of this critical information, leading to inefficiencies and potential non-compliance.
   
2. Ensuring Continuity in Supplier Relationships
   Strong supplier relationships are built on trust and consistency. When a key team member leaves, suppliers may feel uncertain about the continuity of agreements or expectations. Whatever is written into the contract, or documented as part of the contract management approach, there is often a personal relationship that keeps the wheels turning to each party’s benefit. This ‘unwritten’ element of the procurement and contract management cycle is an often unacknowledged factor in ensuring the smooth running of our B2B relationships.  Succession planning helps maintain these relationships by ensuring a seamless transition.
   
3. Aligning Skills with Strategic Goals
   As procurement evolves into a more strategic function, the skills required to excel in the role are changing. A good succession plan identifies and nurtures the skills needed for future success, ensuring that the procurement team is always aligned with organisational objectives.
   
4. Adapting to Market Dynamics
   The procurement landscape is constantly shifting, influenced by factors such as globalisation, protectionist policies, technological advancements, supply-chain disruption, and regulatory changes. Succession planning ensures that the department remains agile and ready to adapt.

Building an Effective Succession Plan for Procurement

Developing a robust succession plan for procurement requires a structured approach that aligns with both the department’s needs and the organisation’s broader strategy. The key steps to creating an effective plan can be summarised as:

1. Conduct a Skills Assessment
This involves evaluating the current skills within the procurement team, identifying gaps, and aligning these insights with future organisational needs. For instance, as procurement moves toward digital transformation, skills in data analysis and technology integration may become more critical.

Skills assessments can take various forms:

• Strategic Skills Assessments: Focus on aligning workforce skills with long-term goals.
• Departmental Skills Assessments: Target specific teams to address immediate gaps.
• Role-Specific Assessments: Evaluate niche roles or hard-to-fill positions, often requiring external expertise (e.g. contract workers, consultants, specialist engagements, etc).
• Soft Skills Assessments: Focus on management, problem solving, communication, and other essential interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence.

Regularly updating these assessments ensures that your succession plan remains relevant and responsive to the current and anticipated needs of your organisation.

2. Identify Key Roles and Successors
Not all roles are equally critical to organisational success. Identify the positions that are most vital to procurement operations.  This could in some circumstances include the roles that are typically associated with succession plans, such as leadership or management roles, but care should also be taken to consider specialised or technical positions, those roles with high-demand skillsets, or, as is often missed, the roles with skillsets or attributes that are simply hard to replace or recruit in the open marketplace. Once these roles are identified, potential successors should be evaluated based on their skills, performance, and readiness.

For each key role, create a development plan that outlines the competencies required, training opportunities, and steps for knowledge transfer. This ensures that successors are prepared to step into the role when needed, and also gives those in your teams opportunities to develop their own skillsets and improve their effectiveness, both for the benefit of your organisation to enhance their own skillsets. As Richard Branson famously said, “train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to”.

3. Develop a Talent Pipeline
Succession planning shouldn’t just be though about as a mechanism to replace individuals should they leave or progress within the organisation, it’s also about building a pipeline of talent that can support the organisation’s growth and resilience. This involves:

• Training and Development: Offering targeted learning opportunities to build required competencies.
• Mentoring and Coaching: Pairing experienced and key personnel with emerging talent to facilitate knowledge transfer.
• Performance Management: Regularly assessing and providing feedback to ensure that potential successors are on track.

Almost every organisation I work with has a performance management programme, but it is less common to see this programme dovetail into their learning and development programmes, and subsequently into any forward structural strategy aligned to any growth or change programmes.  This is a key gap that many organisations could look to improve upon, not just to consider their succession and future adaptability, but also to simply get the ‘biggest bang’ from their training and development budgets.

4. Create an Emergency Succession Plan
While long-term planning is essential, organisations must also prepare for unexpected departures. An emergency succession plan acts as a “break glass” measure, ensuring operational continuity during unforeseen disruptions. This plan should include:

• A list of interim successors or teams to temporarily assume responsibilities.
• Documentation of critical processes and knowledge.
• Clear communication protocols to manage the transition effectively.

5. Integrate Succession Planning with Retention Strategies
High employee attrition can undermine even the best succession plans. To maintain a robust talent pipeline, organisations must focus on retention. This includes offering competitive compensation, professional development opportunities, and a supportive workplace culture. Flexible working arrangements, innovation time, and recognition programs can further enhance employee satisfaction and loyalty.

Aligning Succession Planning with Business Goals

Succession planning in procurement should not exist in isolation; it must align with the organisation’s broader strategic objectives. For example:

• Sustainability Goals: As organisations prioritise environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, procurement teams must adapt to new supplier requirements and reporting standards. Succession plans should prepare future leaders and key personnel to navigate these complexities.
• Digital Transformation: The integration of technology in procurement processes requires a new set of skills, from data analytics, to AI and to supplier risk management. Succession planning should focus on developing these competencies within the team as an ongoing process to stay ahead of the curve.
• Risk Management: Procurement professionals play a crucial role in mitigating supply chain risks. Future professionals must be equipped to handle disruptions, from geopolitical events to cyber threats. A comprehensive succession plan ensures that these skills are considered, cultivated and developed as an intentional part of our business operations.

Keeping the Plan Dynamic

A succession plan is not a static document, it must evolve with the organisation. Regular reviews and updates are essential to ensure that the plan remains aligned with current and future needs. This involves:

• Annual or Bi-Annual Reviews: Assessing the plan’s effectiveness and making necessary adjustments.
• Simulations and Stress Tests: Identifying potential gaps through scenario planning.
• Feedback Loops: Gathering input from employees, stakeholders, and external consultants to refine the plan.

By keeping the plan dynamic, organisations can proactively address emerging challenges both internal and external to the organisation.  We are at a period in time where the only ‘norm’ is change, so we all must factor these changes into our processes and procedures to ensure we continue to bring value to our organisations, and to ensure that we continue to be a strategic, dynamic and adaptable partner to our stakeholders.

Succession planning is not merely an HR exercise; it is a strategic imperative for procurement departments. By identifying critical roles, assessing skills, developing talent pipelines, and integrating retention strategies, organisations can ensure continuity and resilience in their procurement operations. 

We have all seen the horror headlines that [AI, globalism, climate change, etc.] – insert the horror story of your choice – will be a massive disruption to jobs in every sector.  However, procurement is an area that should by its very nature be adaptable to such disruptions, our stock in trade is change, therefore we should consider what this means to our own skillsets. In a world where the pace of change is accelerating, the value of a well-executed succession plan cannot be overstated. It safeguards institutional knowledge, and aligns the procurement team with the organisation’s long-term goals. Most importantly, it provides peace of mind, knowing that the organisation is prepared for whatever comes next.

(This article was first published in the July / August 2025 edition of In-procurement Magazine, pgs. 6-10).

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