Capability Based Planning

Capability Based Planning is ideally a business driven and led mechanism for creating value by planning, creating and delivering strategic business capabilities. It has become important as a way of ensuring that an organization focuses its activities on delivering business capabilities that in turn ensure business objectives and goals, and ultimately the vision, are met.

Capability Based Planning and Enterprise Architecture are well aligned because they both tend to work against the normal line-of-business management and reporting styles that exist in most organizations. Capability Planning is often difficult due to the fact that many lines of business and projects can be simultaneously involved in the delivery of the capability. The planning will typically require a capability to be delivered by a series of increments that span vertical organization structures, projects and time frames.

Enterprise Architect is ideally positioned to assist with Capability Based Planning, with its ability to create any number of views of the repository including a view that shows how a capability is implemented at business, data, application and technology levels. This view will typically cut across other line-of-business views allowing executives and managers to see both a horizontal and a vertical view of the capability.

This section lists the main tools available in Enterprise Architect that can be used to perform Capability Based Planning. There is also a wide range of additional tools that a modeler might find suitable when applying the technique in a particular context. The complete list of tools is available from the Meet the Enterprise Architecture Tools and Additional Enterprise Architecture Tools Help topics.

Stereotyping

The Unified Modeling Language does not itself contain an element to represent a Capability or Capability Increment, but they can be included by using stereotypes, a mechanism for extending the core language. These stereotypes can be applied to a base element such as a Requirement and then the stereotype can be applied to create new Capabilities or Capability Increments. The stereotype will be visible in the Project Browser and diagrams if these options have been set. Capabilities elements can become available if other Technologies or profiles have been enabled.

Learn More: Stereotyping

Traceability Window

The Traceability Window is a useful window that allows a modeler to visualize the connections between elements in the repository. This is useful to show how Capabilities relate to each other and how they are connected to other elements in the model and in turn how those elements are connected. Capabilities can be related to other business architecture elements such as Goals and Drivers and applications architecture elements such as Application Services and Applications and more and all of these relationships would be visible through the Traceability window.

Learn More: Traceability Window