Transition plan template

When a team member leaves, you need to pick up where they left off. To avoid unnecessary backlogs, it’s essential to transfer key knowledge and responsibilities before someone leaves—so you can keep projects moving after they’re gone. 

A transition plan template does more than just organize information. It also gives your team a standardized blueprint for transitions and outlines what steps employees need to take before they leave.

What is a transition plan?

A transition plan is a way to organize and transfer knowledge when team members transition out of a role. It helps maintain continuity by ensuring that no information is lost and projects can keep moving forward. For example, the transition plan for an IT employee could include a list of core responsibilities, passwords for key systems, and outstanding deliverables for upcoming projects. 

A transition plan should be part of your larger employee offboarding program. This helps you and your departing team member tie up all loose ends and part ways on good terms. 

What is a transition plan template?

A transition plan template is a reusable guide that lets you quickly set up a transition plan whenever a team member changes jobs. Instead of creating a transition plan from scratch each time, your template provides a blueprint for the information and responsibilities team members need to transfer before they leave. That means they’re less likely to forget key details, and your team gets a standardized set of information.

The benefits of a digital transition plan template

There’s more to a transition plan template than just a list of responsibilities. You also need to plan how to transfer ownership of key projects and provide your team with the context they need to avoid bottlenecks and keep working. However, it’s difficult (and time consuming) to include all of that information in one static transition plan document. 

Instead, a digital transition plan template lets you quickly link to contextual information and create a concrete schedule for how you’ll transfer ownership of key tasks. It’s a single source of truth you can share with your teammates, and a way to track the progress of transitions. And once you create one digital transition plan template, you can easily reuse it each time a team member changes roles. 

When you create a transition plan template in a project management tool instead of a static document, you can: 

• Standardize the information team members share when they transition.

• Ensure team members pass along key information before they leave.

• Track the progress of transitions in real time.  

• Keep projects moving and make sure key information isn’t lost. 

• Share transition plans with stakeholders.

• Assign owners and deadlines so it’s clear who should take over specific roles and responsibilities. 

• Attach contextual information like documents, spreadsheets, or links to relevant projects.

What to include in your transition plan template

A great transition plan template includes all the key details your team needs to know before someone leaves. But when you’re transferring that much knowledge, organization is key. 

Make sure your transition plan template lets you sort and categorize responsibilities according to things like their priority, expected effort, and timeframe. And to provide sufficient context, you also need a way to link to relevant documentation and related projects. That way, both you and your team can easily navigate each transition plan and find the contextual information you need. 

Integrated features

• List View. List View is a grid-style view that makes it easy to see all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who’s doing what by when.

• Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization.

• Subtasks. Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, subtasks can help. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while keeping the small to-dos connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks.

• Add tasks to multiple projects. The nature of work is cross-functional. Teams need to be able to work effectively across departments. But if each department has their own filing system, work gets stalled and siloed. Asana makes it easy to track and manage tasks across multiple projects. This doesn't just reduce duplicative work and increase cross-team visibility. It also helps your team see tasks in context, view who’s working on what, and keep your team and tasks connected.

Recommended apps

• Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox.

• Outlook. As action items come in via email, like reviewing work from your agency or a request for design assets from a partner, you can now create tasks for them in Asana right from Outlook. You can then assign the new task to yourself or a teammate, set a due date, and add it to a project so it’s connected to other relevant work.

• Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

• Dropbox. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Dropbox file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane.

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