I'm working on a book proposal for Performance-Based Project Management. Here are the elements of this concept,
The 1st element of this framework is Identify the capabilities needed to achieve te project objectives ...
The notion of Capabilities Based Planing is grounded in military planning and acquisition of weapon systems. This approach is well suited for the development or acquisition of any complex system. As well it is a near perfect match for the Agile Development or Agile Project Management paradigm.
Here's a figure from a paper used in the development of these concepts.
This is from a Master's Thesis "Evolutionary Acquisition – A Complementary Approach to Capability Based Planning for the Delivering of Aerospace Power," LtCol C.R.J. Desgagné. The notion that incremental and iterative deployment of needed capabilities has been around for some time is many times lost on IT and software development projects until Agile came along.
But Agile has gone off track - and is coming back - with the notion that requirements emerge. Yes, requirements can emerge, but the needed capabilities must be stable enough to produce value to the project before they change. Otherwise, the work effort is wasted.
In the figure above, the stair steps delivery of a capability is obvious. Actually doing the work needed to produce the benefits from this approach takes more effort. This effort is guided by Systems Engineering Principles. These are not that prevalent in the IT system development domain. But without the Systems Engineering approach, the agile project processes have no basis for describing what "DONE" looks like except the passage of time and consumption of resources.
