Planning for Transitioning to a New Role or Leaving Project Vote Smart
Thank you for your contribution, and we wish you the best of luck in the future!
We hope that you spend the remainder of your time here ensuring a smooth transition, so that your good work is not all for naught. You will want to work with your supervisor to clear your schedule of regular responsibilities, identify your replacement, and construct a plan for this transition. Remember, it typically takes about 6 months to get a new hire up to speed, so you will need to spend as much time as possible equipping Project Vote Smart's manuals and that individual with everything you know. Below are some general guidelines for managing the transition.
Organize Your Division's Materials
- Consider the following and incorporate it to what you pass on:
- What do you wish that you would have known when you started?
- What were the main things that you learned on the job?
- What more would you have liked to learn?
- What made you successful in your job?
- What are the key qualities and skills we should seek in your replacement?
- What barriers or challenges did you face?
- Review the manuals for your division and clarify them or flesh them out as needed to reflect current, approved processes. Ensure there are: responsibilities and the estimated division of time for them; clear objectives and priorities; a basic timeline for an election cycle; standard daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks; explanation of queries, pyqual tests, and other methods of patrolling data; examples of external communications you've dealt with in your position and how to handle them; staff and intern allocation recommendations; reporting requirements; challenges you've faced and how to resolve them
- Prepare a report with your recommendations for the future
- Update calendars and tracking mechanisms
- Organize your division's materials on the network drive, google docs, PVSWiki, physical files, and anywhere else applicable. Clearly label all documents and folders so it is clear what they are and what action items are necessary, if any
- Review open mantis tickets assigned to your division- assign priorities, reassign if high priority and currently assigned to yourself, and update the tickets as needed; transfer your monitored tickets to your replacement
- Add anything on your personal to-do list to mantis as necessary
- Wrap up what you are actively working on, to the extent time allows
- Transfer ownership of any important or useful Google Docs that you have ownership of
- TIP: To locate all documents a user owns on Google Drive, use the search bar to search "owner:USER@votesmart.org". This will generate a list of all docs owned by the user that should be considered for transfer.
Train Your Replacement
Take an inventory of all your responsibilities. From that, construct a training plan and follow through on the following tasks. Your replacement should be shadowing you in all of the activities you do and you should allow them to serve in that role, with your oversight, for as long as possible.
- review any assignments or projects in progress or coming up for your division
- review network drive, google docs, PVSWiki, and physical files
- review all processes for your division
- review strengths, weaknesses, and quirks of personnel under your supervision
- review your specific management methods for your division of responsibility and personnel under your supervision
Complete Administrative Wrap-Up
- clean out your desk if moving or leaving
- forward any email that still needs to be addressed by someone
- let your supervisor know what you'd think is best to do with your email account and the email forwards currently being sent to your account (do we need to go through any email to make sure that there isn't something that needs to be dealt with? should we ultimately forward to someone else? delete?)
- transfer ownership of any PVS google docs, google groups, calendars, etc. attached to your personal Google account, if you have any, to your replacement's Vote Smart account
- remove yourself from calendar events
- transfer any useful files from your desktop/home folder to the appropriate place in the shared drive, or else let us know if it hasn't been done
- pass off anything you are currently in the middle of that needs to be handled by someone else, and make sure they understand what's complete vs. incomplete
- make sure your replacement has access to everything you do (shared drives, email forwards, accounts, passwords, etc.)
- return any Vote Smart files, office keys to Drake University, including interior door keys, etc. that you have in your possession
- provide Office Manager with contact info for forwarding of mail, W2, etc.
- communicate to your supervisor and replacement how you may be contacted or used in a consulting capacity after your departure
Prepare Status Report of Training Progress (to review with your supervisor)
- what's the training progress, training gaps, and where do we go from here with your replacement? Was your original training plan completed in full?
- what is the status of the various projects and tasks of your division? Where do we go from here?
- updates on other tasks listed here
