How to build one for strategic planning
Why use a map?
Strategy and execution aren’t always as close you think.
Business capability mapping creates a shared source of truth based on the CEO’s priorities, or the big picture. Capabilities
visually display the essence of business architecture in a way that all stakeholders can understand.
What is a business capability map?
A business capability defines the tasks, systems and processes that must occur for a business to meet its goals. A business capability map or model is a visual display of the structure and hierarchy of an organisation’s defined capabilities.
Map vs framework
business capability map does not provide any nuance beyond naming a capability and relaying its hierarchical position. A capability framework provides levels of competency for the purposes of performance development, workforce planning and strategic L&D.
A
Defining Capabilities
Consider Current/Future State
Business capabilities should also describe what you have the potential to do. If you’re looking at 3, 5, 10-year plans, consider what capabilities will get you to those goals.
Think Evergreen
Business capabilities should be as stable as possible. If a capability would change if you split up a department, it’s not a true capability.
Decompose Cohesively
When creating levels of sub-capabilities under your core capabilities, you want to think about the business criteria that will make the most sense internally.
Map Building Approaches
Straw-based
starting from scratch and building your map based on internal data.
to industry trends and examples to shape a business capability map around customer needs.
Involves
Whiteboard Look
Top-down
Senior stakeholders help define the highest level of capabilities, each of which is decomposed into more detailed levels.
Bottom-up
Business capabilities are defined at the task level.
Structuring & Organising Your Map
1) Organise Capability Groups
Capabilities defined at this level must be as absolute as you can make them.
An objective view means to segment capabilities by their impact on specific strategic outcomes. A value-chain based view looks at the chains of activities that contribute to said strategic outcomes.
2) Define sub-capabilities
Sub-capabilities provide several functions, from offering nuance for organising teams to showing the chain of necessary tasks in a value stream. You don’t necessarily need to have the same number of sub-capabilities under each core capability or capability group.
3) Decompose sub-capabilities
This is mostly seen in larger companies with complex business structures. Sub-capabilities will have their own further decomposition. This level will likely be the most iterative, but it’ll also give you the most insight for activities like heatmapping and capability prioritisation.
Tenets of Good Planning
Involve your business or enterprise architects from the start Make it cross-functional; this isn’t just a HR or CEO exercise project Plan for iterative refinement over time The simpler the better –use plain business terms Make capabilities mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive Remember that your organisation owns these capabilities. What makes you different from competitors in that regard?
You can learn more about this topic by checking out the full article: https://acornlms.com/enterprise-learningmanagement/business-capability-map