Links to articles from series:
Business Capability Modelling Overview (article 1)
Business Capability in-depth explanation (article 2)
Business Capability Model and its use cases (article 3)
Business Capability Modelling workshop recipes (article 4)
Business Capability Modelling – workshop recipe
Goal and Scope
Business Capability Modelling exercise can be very time-consuming, especially if participants or facilitator don’t have previous experience with it. Due to that, it is essential to clarify the scope and a specific goal before the workshops. I would suggest narrowing down the scope to one department/area/part of the company (if you need a detailed capability model for that department) or engaging C-level executives and narrowing down the scope to only 1-st and maybe 2-nd level business capability model.
Options you will pick depends on the goal you would like to achieve. If your goal is to drive better decomposition into systems/services in one of the departments, then narrow down the scope to just this department and try a middle-down approach; if you are trying to develop a new organizational structure, you could pick a top-down strategy.
Workshops approaches
There are two possible approaches: top-down and middle-down with a bottom-down combination.
Top-down
With the top-down approach, you are starting from the highest level in your organization. This level usually has common parts between different industries. You will usually see at these level capabilities that resemble your high-level company structure, like Human Resources or Sales & Marketing. When you go down the ladder to the second level of capabilities, it will become much more company and industry-specific; you see your unique value proposition on this level.
Participants of this workshop are C-level executives, directors, department heads, business architects, chief & enterprise architects.
During this workshop, you usually stop at the second level. It is enough in-depth analysis to enable further steps like an in-detailed Business Capability Model per area. Usually, it is impossible to analyze your company deeper with the same set of people you gathered for the top-down approach exercise (they lack detailed knowledge).
Middle-down & Bottom-up combination
Middle-down with the bottom-down approach is usually your second step when high-level business capabilities are already modeled, and they form a cornerstone of your further work. When you have top levels ready, you can use them to visualize the scope during middle-down workshops. For example, during workshops, we want to split further just one specific capability from level 2. You could organize this workshop for many reasons like,
- to understand deeper your domain/business
- as guidance on how to split your solution space into systems and services
- to be able to apply a new organizational structure to your department
- to discover possible data products
- to analyze which parts of your domain are core and which are just supporting or generic, and to invest your time and money adequately
You should invite business experts, directors, department heads, enterprise & software architects, solution & product owners for this workshop.
Middle-down with a bottom-up recipe
Before the workshop:
Prepare prerequisites
It is essential to get prepared for this workshop. In the middle-down approach as a prerequisite, prepare a 1-st or 1-st and 2-nd level of business capabilities upfront to visualize narrowed scope at the beginning of the workshops. You could do it during top-down workshops with C-level, or if it is not possible, you can prepare a good-enough model on your own with some business experts. If possible, you should prepare artifacts like value chain analysis or domain storytelling for a deeper understanding of the domain. It would be even better if the same group of people would participate in the domain storytelling session to prepare for the workshop.
Invite participants
The right group of people is crucial for the workshops’ success. As I mentioned before, to make this workshop successful, you should invite business experts, directors, department heads, enterprise & software architects, solution & product owners. The invitation should be sent at least 2 weeks in advance. We should explain the goal, scope, and expectations thoroughly upfront.
Plan:
- Clarify the scope again and review the higher-level capability model
- Capabilities candidates
- Value chains or value shops
- Impact Mapping – tweaked version
- “Ability to…” – brainstorming
- Capabilities refinement and validation
- Introduce a detailed version of the business capability definition
- Remove wrong capabilities and do deduplication
- Alternative ways to deliver outcome or value in the past and future
- Prepare abstraction candidates per outcome
- 4-step validation of capabilities
- Candidate Business Capability Model
- MECE verification
Clarify the scope again and review the higher-level capability model
The workshop should be started with scope clarification. You could use for that purpose the already prepared high-level Business Capability Model. It should be clear for every participant which part of the organization we are trying to model.
Capabilities candidates
The next step is to create as many raw ideas as possible. At this point, you don’t need to focus so much.
Do we have any value chains or value shops?
Suppose there is an available value chain analysis for the area that you are focused on. In that case, you could review it with the rest of the group. Usually, steps in the value chain can be nicely mapped into higher-level capabilities that can be further decomposed. If there is no value chain analysis available, I suggest preparing a simplified version during this workshop.
Impact Mapping with deliverables as capabilities
To make the whole process more smooth, you can start with a tweaked version of the Impact Mapping exercise, but instead of deliverables, you focus on capabilities needed to achieve an outcome (called impact in impact mapping).
“Ability to…” – brainstorming
The two above options give you a more structured way to develop capabilities, but there is a risk that we are still missing some crucial capability that fit neither value chain nor impact mapping. In this simple exercise, you ask participants to come up with as many raw ideas as possible. They should put sticky notes that represent what their department or area is capable of doing. Try not to constrain them. You should end up with as much raw material as possible.
Capabilities refinement and validation
After the Capability Candidates part, you should see a variety of options. The majority of them will not meet the requirements of Business Capability. Still, all of them will be good food for thought. Despite your best efforts, some participants will misunderstand this exercise, so you will have capabilities like “Ability to search on UI,” “Ability to persist data,” etc. Now comes the most challenging part; you need to coin out the true Business Capabilities from those ideas. You could approach it in two possible ways. The first option, you can try to do it on your own and then just review the result with the rest of the group on the other session. The second option, you can do it with the whole group with your guidance. The second option is very challenging due to the complexity of the Business Capability definition. You will spend a lot of time correcting other participants. But on the other hand, they can provide you with tons of additional insights. Either way, the question is how to perform refinement and validation.
Introduce a detailed version of the business capability definition
Try to explain business capability again but in detail this time, emphasize:
- abstract nature of it
- that you should be able to sell it as a product or service
- it answers WHAT question
- verb-noun form
- it is your organization’s ability to do something
- it is built around the outcome
Remove clearly wrong capabilities and do deduplication
After a detailed definition, the group should locate the clearly wrong capabilities, ask them to move these on the side. Try to group similar or the same capabilities. Remove those phrased the same but leave those similar but worded differently. If capabilities do not come from Impact Mapping and at the same time are not connected to the outcome (impact from impact mapping). Come up with the expected outcome for every group of capabilities. Remind the group definition of outcome. (LINK)
Alternative ways to deliver outcome or value in the past and future
For every group around the outcome, ask participants the question: “How this outcome was delivered ten years ago? How you think it will be delivered ten years from now? Will answers to those questions change the name or outcome of capability?”.
Prepare abstraction candidates per outcome
Try to come up with some business abstractions – true Business Capabilities, one per outcome. This is the most challenging part. Your group will not be able to do it independently from the beginning; you will have to guide them through examples and explain your thought process. I recommend you to try to come up with 3-4 business capabilities as a demonstration. When you make sure that most people understand what we are trying to achieve, divide your group into smaller subgroups (3-4 people). Every group picks its outcome of interest. They are trying to come up with business capability on their own. Circle around between groups cause there will be for sure a lot of confusion at the beginning.
4-step validation of capabilities
When we finally have a raw list of business capabilities, we go into the cross-checking phase. Every group is validating the other group’s abstractions, and then they are sharing their results and refined ideas. Use the 4-step validation method that we described here [LINK].
Candidate Business Capability Model
After those steps, we finally have some good-enough Business Capability Model, with the group, try to arrange it in the desired form.
MECE verification
When it is ready, analyze it again and verify if it fulfills the MECE principle. MECE stands for: mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. The Business Capability Model should fully describe your business, and there should be no overlaps between capabilities.
Links to articles from series:
Business Capability Modelling Overview (article 1)
Business Capability in-depth explanation (article 2)
Business Capability Model and its use cases (article 3)
Business Capability Modelling workshop recipes (article 4)
