Transition Plan Template for When You've Resigned

You might have seen transition plan documents or templates out there for managers to use when they have a new person starting in a role. But you probably haven’t seen a many of transition plan templates to use when you’ve resigned from a job. We’ve created this transition plan template (and you can rename it to match how you view handing over responsibilities) because it’s important for you to handle the resignation process professionally.

A transition plan is a nice approach for documenting your assignments when you have enough lead time to create and discuss it. You don’t have to make a large amount of work for yourself, but if you can set your co-workers up for success, it’ll help ease any unrest or tension as you prepare to leave.

You can download the sample template that we created and use it as a starting point to gather your thoughts. We’ve included several types of tables and information styles, so don’t get overwhelmed by all the choices! Essentially, our goal was to try out a few different options for designing and organizing the information so that you can choose your favorites and then customize based on the type of work you do and how much detail you want to include in your transition plan. You can organize the transition plan in any way you like.

For example, if you don’t need to document all of your daily tasks, but instead just need to cover a couple of assigned projects, your topic titles could simply be “Project 1,” “Project 2″ and so on. But if you want to walk someone through your entire job responsibilities, you might include a “Standard Assignments” section to list the daily tasks, timings, team members, expectations, and instructions for completing the work. You might want to distinguish between continuous job responsibilities and ad hoc assignments that you might have as part of a project team, committee, or volunteer effort.

Special Projects

For each project to which you’d been assigned, you’ll want to give the key information so your replacement(s) can prepare to complete the work on time and know who they’ll be working with.

Some topics you can cover include the project title, background information, team members and contact information, your assigned tasks, milestones, timelines, links to files and schedules, attachments, screen shots, processes, procedure steps, service level agreements (SLAs), status and risks.

Standard Assignments

What are you responsible for consistently, daily, always part of your job, that will continue for whomever takes over your role? What level of detail do you need to share? You don’t want to overdo it, because sometimes too much information is stifling and doesn’t allow someone to figure out their own path. But you don’t want to leave people hanging, wondering where you’ve saved documents or who they should communicate with.