Capability-based Planning in 7 moves!

What is CBP and why is it so effective?

Capability-based Planning (CBP) is the process of business change planning in terms of business capabilities. A Business Capability (BC) is a collection or container of people, processes, and technology needed to execute a business function. Human resources management, procurement management, product development management, etc. are all examples of BCs. Each business needs a set of BCs in order to fulfill its mission and strategies. On the other hand, since every single people, process, or technology component of any organization lies in some BC, a complete set of BCs provides a high-level partition of the organization. Modeling BCs by Business Capability Maps (CapMaps) is an appropriate way to provide a single-page view of the business.

Classical approaches to business change planning put focus on different aspects of business change by defining several actions in parallel streams of actions (i.e., projects and programs) to re-organize the enterprise, improve business processes, and develop IT support of business service. These silos of actions often fail to make real and persistent change aligned with the strategic directions of the organization, due to issues like delayed pre-requisite actions, not-synched BC, broken capability architecture, and unbalanced workload. Shifting to a capability-based approach to change planning, which means setting overall and increment change goals in terms of BCs, enables the business to avoid all of these issues (see Benefits of Capability-based Migration Planning).

CBP is a simple, intuitive, and yet effective approach to change planning which:

• Integrates re-organization, process improvement, and technology-oriented projects in a unified and consistent way, in terms of BCs move-forward actions,
• Links strategy directly and traceably to architecture changes,
• Facilitates communication with top-level business managers by hiding architectural complexities behind the BC landscape.
• Provides a good starting point for enterprise architecture development, by offering a whole-scope, long-time, and low-depth strategic architecture roadmap.

In this series of articles, I will introduce a simple and practical 7-step method to perform CBP in virtually every organization. Subsequent posts cover:

Move #1: Identify and model business capabilities

Move #2: Asses maturity

Move #3: Asses strategic importance

Move #4: Analyze the capability landscape

Move #5: Set improvement goals

Move #6: Define actions

Move #7: Design change portfolio