TVA's Succession Planning

The TVA has stated its future depends on effective succession planning and faces a potential workforce challenge due to retirement within the next five years. Also, TVA has identified a risk of senior leadership attrition that could leave a gap in key positions. This review was conducted as a follow-up to a previous OIG review of TVA's succession planning. The objective of this review was to assess TVA's succession planning.This review found TVA has made improvements to succession planning; however, areas for improvement still exist. Improvements include the use of a talent grid, implementation of succession planning metrics, and a more accurate attrition prediction model. In addition, we found TVA could strengthen some best practices.While TVA has made progress in its succession planning process, we found, through interviews and review of documentation, areas for improvement still exist. Specifically, areas of improvement include: (1) follow-up on action items identified in talent reviews including the development of organizational action plans; (2) cross-pollination of talent; (3) reduction in talent review preparation time; and (4) frequent revisions of the talent review and succession planning process, which have caused frustration among TVA management. Additionally, TVA is working to address areas of concern regarding populating succession plans with realistic candidates.As part of this review, we identified succession planning best practices and compared them to processes TVA had in place. Of the ten best practices identified, we found TVA could strengthen executive ownership, onboarding of succession candidates, and transparency of the succession planning process. In addition to these findings, all TVA managers who were interviewed expressed concern with the use of forced distribution for the talent grid.We made recommendations to management to address the findings in the report.