What is Capability Based Planning?

So What’s This CapabilityBased Planning All About Then?

CAPABILITY = PROCESS + PEOPLE + PHYSICAL

At the core of Jibility is the concept of capability-based planning. Used extensively for defense and military planning by the US, UK, Australian and Canadian governments, it has also become popular in the business domain, in particular for developing systems and IT-related strategies.

The theory is that those organizations that possess superior capability to execute strategy will win – whether they are the armed forces or a business.

Thus, this technique has been adopted and codified by the business world and is now embodied in industry frameworks, including The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®), which is used extensively for planning information technology strategy and architecture. Building on TOGAF®, the Business Architecture Guild® has developed an excellent in-depth guide to capability-based planning and related business and IT architecture disciplines, called A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK®). This is well worth a read if you want to immerse yourself in the mechanics of capability-based planning and business architecture.

Whilst capability-based planning has long been one of the tools of trade for military planners and strategists, consultants, and enterprise architects, it hasn’t been widely understood or adopted in the broader community.

We think that capability-based planning is extremely effective. So effective, that we wanted to simplify it so it could be used by all sorts of people, for all sorts of things. Hence we developed Jibility: a distillation of the technique to its essential raw essence, simplifying the approach, and creating a powerful tool that everyone and anyone can use. We wanted to equip today’s busy leaders with the means to bridge the gap from visionary strategy

to pragmatic execution, as simply and quickly as possible. With Jibility, we believe we have succeeded in helping them do just that.

In capability-based planning, a capability describes what the business does and should not be confused with just the skills or competencies of the people (which the HR function also refers to as a capability). So, a business capability is described by more than just the people perspective; it includes the process and physical perspectives. In other words, a business capability can describe the processes involved, the physical objects used, and the people roles and skills required as well.

So why do think Capability-Based Planning is Cool?

It’s a top-down, whole-of-organization approach. It breaks through departmental silos.

It focuses directly on what an organization needs to do to execute its strategy.

It directly links initiatives and projects back to capability improvements, and in turn back to the organization’s objectives. No more random initiatives that seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight don’t actually align to your strategy.

It cuts the wheat from the chaff. It helps you determine the highest priority capabilities that you need to develop, and the related initiatives you should focus on. It clarifies and optimizes business investment.

It stops you from jumping to conclusions about solutions too soon. By delaying solution definition and doing it in the context of capabilities, it opens you up to alternatives rather than simply incrementing existing deployed equipment, processes and people.

It provides a systematic way of identifying change initiatives. Many business planning approaches define mission, goals and objectives and then start spawning initiatives and projects. By looking at what capabilities are required to meet your objectives, it provides clarity for your initiatives.

Capability-based planning and the Jibility approach works

We’ve applied the method to an existing business plan and roadmap that was developed for one of our clients without using capability-based planning, to see what we’d get. We worked bottom-up and top-down, meeting in the middle: effectively backtesting and verifying the approach.

We started at the final Jibility Step, collating all of the initiatives that were either being executed or planned. We then developed a capability map for the entire business, broke the initiatives down into actions, and linked them back to those capabilities that they were impacting. Going back to the first Jibility Step, we then entered the current challenges the client was facing and their current documented business objectives/goals. We worked with them to identify which capabilities were required to achieve those objectives, thereby now linking challenges and objectives all the way through to initiatives. What did we find?

• Some challenges had no related business objectives or goals to address them (and therefore no projects or initiatives were planned to address these challenges).

• Several projects were improving capabilities that had no linkage to any identified business objective. Whilst they may have been good things to do, they were diverting attention and resources away from more important projects.

• Priorities were misaligned. Projects that the leadership team initially said were high priority were relegated to medium or low priority once they could see that they were investing in business capabilities that were already strong. On the flip side, other business capabilities that directly linked to business objectives were not receiving sufficient focus. There were several business capabilities that were critical to achieving the strategy that had no courses of action or initiatives.

• There were several business capabilities of no consequence to achieving the strategy that had high-cost initiatives related to them.

• There were several new capabilities that the business required to achieve its strategy that they hadn’t previously foreseen.

As a result, the client’s leadership team were able to reshape their portfolio of projects to better align to and execute their strategy.

So, whatever challenges may face your organization, you can be confident that capability-based planning and the Jibility approach will focus you and your team to meet them head-on and drive through to the achievement of your long-term strategic vision.