CapabilityMapping

STRATEGIC CAPABILITY MAPPING

A pre-requisite for the success of any business is to have a clear, and up to date, strategic picture of where it is going and how it is going to get there. Without this, your company’s unique potential and your people’s talent will lack direction and their impact will be blunted.

MMA perceives the starting point of strategy as being the company’s objectives, both explicit and implicit. To deliver a renewed strategy, aimed at providing the business with sustained prosperity, the necessary wherewithal needs to be put in place. Otherwise known as total capability or enablers, the essence of “wherewithal” usually takes the form of people, process, IS/IT (systems), IP, facilities, financial means, et al. Research shows knowledge-based assets (primarily people and information systems) are becoming increasingly important for companies’ competitive success. So it is important that intangible as well as tangible assets need to be converted into tangible outcomes.

Meeting the new strategic objectives (distilled into executable strategic plans) will bring with it inevitable change in the size and shape of the business going forward. Organisational transformations require re-alignment and focus; re-alignment of all organisational resources (capability) to the new strategic objectives coupled with intensive focus on implementing the strategic plans throughout the organisation. This approach needs to be underpinned with more broadly based performance measures which go far beyond mere financial/management accounting measures (important though these will remain). Access to strategic collaborative partners or supply chain should also be taken into account.

MMA believes that strategic capability mapping, utilising a robust enterprise integration model, is the most effective tool in providing this alignment, focus and performance measurement on a continual basis. It ensures that the strategic fit is always maintained. The approach considers each of strategic objectives in turn, mapping them to the key capabilities and other enablers (eg accreditations/ compliance factors) needed to deliver them – all in the context of the synergies and interdependencies within the business. The exercise highlights any capability gaps (either a total absence of such - or a lower than required level). In turn the mapping (crucially) then identifies the business improvement change action plans required to close the capability gaps on a ‘how far, how fast’ basis.

Once the model is in place and the links established, not only may the dependencies of strategic objectives on capability be determined initially, but also, should the strategic objective change for whatever reason, any change to required capability (ie enhanced, diminished or deleted) will also be evident from the model. It should be noted that any particular capability may be serving more than one strategic objective on a ‘many to one’ basis)

MMA can give objective and experienced support to getting a grip on your company’s strategic goals and the imperatives for achieving them: informing the change programmes needed to achieve optimised objectives in the most cost-effective business environment.

MMA brings to this a strategic perception free from restrictive preconceptions whilst ever-mindful of real-world realities; also our structured conceptualisation and our ability to innovate. This we reflect in the strategic model: articulating your goals and the enablers required for their fulfilment, and going on to map the capability needed down to the specific initiatives needed to realise the strategic aspirations.

Our contribution may be appropriate at various junctures of the corporate lifecycle:

when you suspect your previously successful strategy is getting stale

when your company stands at the cross-roads, with a major decision to make

when you see an opportunity, but aren’t quite sure how to realise it.