Monday, August 30, 2021

Capability Assessment

Organizational capability management, in essence, consists of a portfolio or matrix of capabilities that are used in various combinations to build the business competency, implement the business strategy and achieve outcomes.


Business capability defines "what" a business does or can do by encapsulating all organization resources (tangible, intangible or human resources) to achieve certain results. The enterprise consists of a set of capabilities; capabilities continue being considered the market-relevant bundles of resources with the potential to drive competitiveness. 

A firm's capabilities today are the result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. Business management needs to make an objective assessment, fine tuning organizational capability and increasing capability coherence is always critical to accelerate business performance and improve organizational maturity.

Is this capability valuable? Organizational capability presents the high level view on how business can achieve certain goals without getting involved in too many details .Organizational capabilities have business outcomes; they collaborate with each other and are enabled by interrelated processes, talent, services, functions, interfaces, resources in organization. The business executives have to make an objective assessment of their capability portfolio for evaluating capability adequacy, maturity, and getting high ROIs.

Is this capability valuable? Capability provides a level of abstraction that allows more open consideration from multiple perspectives. The top tier is a common executive view of the condition or suitability of capability to support the intended operations and implement a well-defined business strategy. Adding value won't be the same for every company; business management should evaluate by checking up: Does the capability add value to customers, engage employees, optimize business functions, or improve the overall organizational maturity?

Is this capability non-substitutable? Is this capability rare?
Every organization has their set of capabilities to get work done. Leading companies usually have some unique capabilities to make them stand out and differentiate them from others to achieve better business results. When the organizations across the vectors move up their maturity level, their capabilities are moving from base or competitive level to differentiated level when an organization decides to differentiate by taking an existing capability to the next level, or integrating different capabilities into a unique set of business competencies.

Every organization is different, they are also at the different stages of business growth, there is no one size fitting all formulas or practices to develop a learning organization and build unique competency. When assessing their capability maturity and overall maturity of the company, business leaders need to ponder around: Are there duplicated capabilities across business functions? Is the capability rare or “me-too” type? The successful up level capability management will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of the crucial points and how they influence each other in building solid and differentiated business competency via continually modernization, integration, and optimization. The goal is to ensure that strategic goals can be accomplished collaboratively and consistently and reach the next business growth cycle effortlessly.

Is this capability costly to imitate? Capability encapsulates process, people and technology, as well as other intangible and tangible resources which are important for a business capability to be effective. Many best practices in the industries perhaps intend to imitate some competitive necessary capability development. However, some competitive unique capabilities evolve and move between categories based on the technology evolution, business driver, business model evolution etc. There are learning and unique culture ingredients or management expertise that the organization goes with. They are firm-specific resources/assets that are difficult if not impossible to imitate. Even if you can make it, it perhaps does not fit for your organizational purpose.

Forward thinking companies continue to upgrade organizational capabilities with repurpose, realignment, and reconfiguration. The best scenario is to create a comprehensive capability map to bridge capability gaps and clarify business objectives. Effectively leverage the existing and new technologies or methodologies to shape dynamic digital capabilities; help to innovate business via the process optimization and capacity building; and recombine capabilities to the new distinctive capabilities. To speed up business growth, high mature organizations won’t imitate, but build their unique set of dynamic capabilities and further build the organization’s strengths in core areas and differentiated competency. The goal is to ensure that strategic goals can be accomplished quickly and consistently and reach the next business growth cycle effortlessly.

It is important to identify the key business capability and make an objective assessment of capability maturity. Resource is an important building block of dynamic capability. There are both opportunities and risks for every investment. The often described business capability attributes include such as robustness, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, improvement, sensitivity, optimization, resilience, etc. It's important to continually evaluate capability based investments in terms of value, risk, and reward, for building a cohesive business capability portfolio.

Capability view makes the business management both confident and humble to assess their organization objectively. Fine-tuned business capabilities offer a competitive advantage in delivering and selling the products/services/processes, and supports the strategic direction of the organization. Enterprise capability management, in essence, consists of a portfolio or matrix of capabilities that are used in various combinations to build the business competency, implement the business strategy and achieve outcomes.

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