In my last post I talked about starting with business value. Remember that a business capability describes something the business depends on for a specific purpose or outcome. As Mike Cottmeyer talks about in his post, Falling into the How Trap (http://www.leadingagile.com/2009/08/falling-into-how-trap.html ), Capability Analysis helps you change your view from process and politics… how you are doing work… to the actual business outcomes needed.
This is important, because in many companies silos, inertia, and budgeting all contribute to problems in organizations getting to business value. Here is an example of how Re-Thinking using business capabilities led to dramatic results in a difficult environment. The client was a financial services client. They were in a very politically charged environment that arose from rapid growth through acquisition followed by rapidly changing market conditions. This client was moving in an unfavorable financial direction. There was a lack of cash, tremendous pressure on IT, and recent lay-offs had led to a loss of trust and historical knowledge.
We met with executives to make sure we understood their strategy and could articulate it simply. We then worked with the managers to create a business capability baseline from the capabilities in the organization. We identified those capabilities that were most important to achieving the core business objectives and the goals for the strategic project. Against this view we reconciled the budgeted capital projects budget and the IT related operating expenses.
Our results showed three significantly interesting capabilities. For the most part our findings were not new situations – but the capability analysis brought visibility to them. This is one of the real powers of capability analysis. By focusing on learning “What” they did, then understanding how they did them and where they were investing we were able to present the findings to the business in a way that overcame the politics driving most of the decision making.
The majority of the budgeted and in process projects were focused on Manage-Customer -Requests. At first blush, this was reasonable since there was a sizeable Customer Service group and this was their primary focus. All of the requests would have resulted in improving how the Manage-Customer -Requests capability performed. These requests were prioritized to the top of the list because the VP of Customer Service was influential. But given the current needs of the business, this capability performed suitably – there was no performance gap in this capability.
Although, there were only three budgeted requests against it, the largest capability gap existed in Negotiate-Customer-Terms. This was also high business value because keeping the right customers and getting valuable new customers with the right offers was the key to the survival and profitability of the company. This project was not budgeted.
We also found four separate Business Intelligence efforts focused on Analyze-Customer-and-Market-Data. Two of them had been brought in from acquisitions. One of them was a rogue project started by the marketing group when they felt IT was too slow to respond. All of these were used (or planned to be used) for internal analysis and none of them were integrated into the customer service platform.
Using our findings from the capability analysis we were able to get agreement to shut down the redundant BI projects – saving about $8 million a year. Despite the momentum on these initiatives, they were not currently delivering value, they were unfocused in their efforts, and they weren’t aimed at high business value/low performing capabilities. We were able to draw from the best of these projects for the most important effort.
We then used the findings to get the VP of Customer Service to agree to stop the Manage-Customer-Requests initiatives. Even though these projects were budgeted, and some were in progress, the VP realized IT needed to focus their resources more effectively.
We then focused IT resources on the Negotiate-Customer-Terms leverage point and the necessary data integration. Since our need was very clear, we were able to generate very tight business requirements for the BI and development teams. Leveraging Agile development techniques we were able to complete the development and integration rapidly.
In summary, through performing a ReThink using capabilities analysis, we found redundant investment of $8 million that we were able to recover almost immediately. Then, by laser focusing development efforts on the most important business capabilities, we were able to deliver an initiative that improved the company’s portfolio retention by over $15 million a year. The total project lasted less than 9 months, cost less than the savings from eliminating the redundancy, and delivered what was most important to the business.
Capability Analysis allowed us to overcome silos, inertia, and the politics surrounding budgets. We were able to find cash for the project, relieve pressure on IT resources, and overcome a loss of organizational knowledge. By building a common view of “What” the business did and identifying needs at the top of the Business Value/Performance stack – the business reached agreement on what was needed and aligned their efforts accordingly. There are probably a lot of ways to accomplish this type of alignment, but we have consistently found success using Business Capability Analysis.