Here at the Agora Insights blog, we will feature a question or assignment or interesting discussion from our Business Analysis and Business Architecture learner community forum.

This week, we are a featuring a question about Business Architecture.

Question: 

I want to be sure my understanding is right, how do you know when your capability isn't working well? a capability e.g. product management might work in certain scenarios and not work in others. Also how do you enhance the capability, you mentioned investing in that capability, how do you do that? please can you give a real life scenario example for this.

Agora Insights Senior Instructor, Deirdre Caren answered the above question.

Answer:

Your capability links to other architectural blueprints like value streams, organisation charts, product, policies etc. A rating of your capability happens at the moment of what that capability is used - ie capability instance.

Let's say we are building a house. We have ordered bricks and we are using them inside and outside the house. We then see that these bricks are not fit for purpose for outside. That would require a "heat map" to note that it is not performing as intended.

Let's say a sales team is using the capability "Product Management" to map their value stream "Take a Trip"

As they go through the steps they find that the Product Management capability doesn't really offer "Prepare for Departure" materials and only offers "Plan Trip" materials. 

This would cause us to consider that capability being poor, thus requiring heat mapping.