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    Business capabilities. The blueprint for better strategic decisions

    Business Capability Management supports planning and facilitates strategic alignment of change projects. Here is why understanding business capabilities matters, and how the practice supports transformation.

    By Projeects Team ·

    What a business capability is

    According to The Open Group (2018), a business capability is a particular ability or capacity that a business may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose or outcome.

    Figure 1. Example of capability mapFigure 1. Example of capability map
    Figure 1. Example of capability map

    At Projeects, we understand business capabilities as the strategic representation of the resources that enable an organization to operate, execute its strategy, and generate value. Unlike processes or organizational structures, capabilities describe what an organization is able to do, regardless of how it is organized or the technologies it uses.

    The capability map

    A Capability Map is a model representing everything the company can do or needs to have at any given moment to achieve its objectives. Each individual capability on the map can be navigated at deeper levels of detail, becoming progressively clearer about the specific resources, processes, people, information and technologies that support it, in both current (AS IS) and future (TO BE) states.

    Figure 2. Components of a business capabilityFigure 2. Components of a business capability
    Figure 2. Components of a business capability

    How to build it incrementally

    • Prepare a general Capability Map of the company including everything it can do today.
    • Each new change project feeds in the specific resources of the capabilities it will affect.
    • Each new change project modifies the affected capabilities to include the new resources or changes to be implemented.

    Why this benefits strategy

    Over time, the Capability Map matures and accumulates the information needed to support investment decisions. Strategic planning improves because it can base decisions about new resources on a real understanding of the resources already available, and where they fall short.

    Done consistently, this turns every change project into an investment in the organization's strategic intelligence, not just into the change itself.