Mapping business capabilities step-by-step

When you build a business capability map, you are modeling the capabilities that your business currently has, or the capabilities that your business must have to support your business.

  1. Create a new capability map.
  2. Identify the highest level capabilities of your business and add these as elements to your map.
    1. To add a new capability from the Outline view, select an existing element in the outline view and click Enter. A new capability is added with the default name highlighted so that you can specify your own name for the capability.
    2. To add a new capability in the diagram view, hover over the edge of an existing capability in the diagram. A highlighted insertion point appears indicating the direction of insertion for the new capability. For example, an highlighted area below an element indicates the insertion point for the new capability is below, and a highlighted area to the left or right of an element indicates the insertion point to the right or left, respectively. Click to add the capability in the highlighted insertion point. Give the new capability a meaningful name by typing the name and hitting Enter again to commit it.
    For example, your highest level capabilities for your whole organization might be:
    • Product Development
    • Product Marketing
    • Product Delivery
    • Business Operations
    If you are mapping only the capabilities of a particular segment of your business, for example, Product Marketing capabilities, you might begin by mapping the high-level Product Marketing capabilities.
  3. Decompose these high-level capabilities into lower-level capabilities and add these lower-level capabilities as sub-capabilities in your map. To drill down into a capability, click the
    button. You can see from the breadcrumb trail at the top of the diagram that you have moved a level down in the diagram. Add sub-capabilities at this level, and optionally drill down into these capabilities to further decompose them.

    For example, you might decompose the Product Delivery capability into Market Research, Advertising, Product Launch.

    One way to figure out how to decompose your business into capabilities is to identify the key services or products that your business offers, and list the high-level activities that enable your business to offer these things. For example, if your company builds and sells motorcycles, you would need to perform market analysis, product development, advertising and sales, distribution, and so on. These are all capabilities that support your business.

  4. Continue decomposing the capabilities until you reach the desired level of detail. For each capability that you add, you can add rich-text descriptions for that capability in the details view, as well as defining attributes and attaching any related material such as text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.
  5. Create references to the processes that implement the capability.
  6. Optional: Use color-coding to identify areas of the map that require attention, or to identify future capabilities that are required to support your business strategy.
  7. Add owners, attachments, or document links to individual capabilities.