Forward Terrain

An organization’s performance is driven by its ‘capabilities’. A capability can be defined as an organization’s tangible and intangible assets working together to produce a result. For example, people, skills, procedures, tools and equipment are combined in particular ways to ensure a key production process operates effectively.

In total, an organization relies on many hundreds to thousands of diverse capabilities across its operations. These capabilities can be broadly defined as;

• Capabilities that generate performance: For example in a manufacturing organization, the people, processes and systems working together to create the end product.
• Capabilities that protect the performance generating activities: For example maintenance activities, legal or IT checks and controls.

Given today’s changing and demanding environment, how effectively an organization’s capabilities will perform into the future becomes more important to maintaining and improving performance.

To date there has been no reliable, comprehensive and practical solution for organizations to address the challenge of measuring and managing its capabilities. This is because current practices are;

• Unable to construct a measure of capability: There is no simple and robust approach to deriving a measure for a capability.
• Unable to measure a capability into the future: There is inability to measure the inherent uncertainty (subjectivity) that is always there when attempting to produce a measure about future conditions: The level of subjectivity is a critical component which can change the capability’s effectiveness level, and therefore needs to be properly represented in the overall measurement.

To reliably measure and manage thousands of capabilities across an organization requires a fundamentally different approach to current practices. The solution required needs to be a robust enterprise system that can work effectively at a local work group level, sharing information, tracking, communicating and alerting, while simultaneously integrating and collating high-level management and executive views for analysis and reporting. Only a specialized enterprise application can perform this function.

Managing the Drivers and Threats
to Performance:

• Managing Capability
• Managing Risk