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.
CBP is a simple, intuitive, and yet effective approach to change planning which:
For a more details on Golsoft's approach to CBP in a practical, step-by-step process, see Capability-based Planning in 7 Moves!