Over the years, the success rate of traditional project management methods applied to software development projects has been underwhelming. Capabilities–Based planning provides a defined outcome that is not a conclusion but lays the groundwork for the continued delivery of value. Objectives are reached and the operational value delivered when a defined capability is available for use.
Features and functions describe static and dynamic behaviors of a system, but they are not directly connected to the business strategy. Milestones indicate that a position in a timeline has been reached, but do not forecast what value will be delivered to the business or how this value is traceable to the needs of the user community.
Capabilities–Based planning:
- Transforms the delivery of features and functions into the delivery of processes and technologies that support the business strategy.
- Is planning, under the conditions of uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for a wide range of business challenges and circumstances, while working within an economic framework.
This approach emphasizes flexibility, adaptiveness, and robust capabilities, implying a modular building–block approach to the delivery of enterprise applications.
A capability provides an outcome or an effect without an a priori specification. Features and functions require an a priori specification to test for their existence or conformance to the specification.
Guided by Capabilities‒Based Planning, we can widen the perspective of project success by ...
- Introducing technology and programmatic reality into planning and decision-making processes at the Enterprise level.
- Shaping, engineering, and validating solutions needed to deploy the capabilities.
- Making decisions on systems within a Capabilities context.
- Engineering relationships across the set of systems that together satisfy the need (systems of systems).
- Synchronizing interactions among programs to satisfy multiple capabilities (roadmaps).
- Providing a coherent digital transformation strategy supporting distributed, adaptive operations (portfolios).
Putting Capabilities–Based planning to work requires a change in our approach to planning — a set of business process improvement activities focused on assessing the increasing maturity of the capabilities needed to fulfill the strategic objectives. Emphasis is placed on operational capabilities rather than features and functions. These operational capabilities become the building blocks of change. The emphasis is also placed on evaluating capabilities under conditions of uncertainty, which requires the deployment of robust building blocks capable of adapting to these changes.
In both cases, analysis illuminates the feasibility of alternatives.
