In my line of work I often come to realize that deadlines are met and projects get done because of the heroics and the talents of individual people and not because of the established processes. This is a clear sign of an immature organization and a symptom of poor capability management. Traditional PM world typically starts with the resource capacity planning exercise. Managers focus on questions like “How much or How Many”. It is considered that execution is only limited by capacity constraints. Capabilities are expected to “automatically” develop inside the projects and thus, are not a mainstream planning tool. However, reality and project failures prove that there are inherent flaws in this model.
In this context, I aim to highlight the importance of focusing on capability management in this post. Optimized capabilities can enable larger throughputs and increased efficiencies, thus sidelining strict capacity planning.
The capability management function plays a crtitical role in an organization’s overall portfolio management, from strategic planning to portfolio selection and optimization, through portfolio execution, to realizing the resulting value to the organization. Capability management elaborates what aspects of resource capacity are avialble and addresses the attributes, competences and skills associated with resources and organizational support for portfolios.
The objective of capability management is to determine and optimize what the organization can potentially do.
A capability is the ability of an organization through its people, processes and systems to execute an entire portfolio of initiatives for delivering goods and services. Capability creates competences that provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace and deliver a desired customer value proposition and the achievement of the organization’s goals and objectives.
Capability differs from capacity in that capacity is how much the organization can do now, at the present time, while capability refers to the potential of the organization that may or may not be exploited. Capability can also indicate the ability of the organization to ramp up required resources to execute work when the capacity is at a shortfall at a point in time.
Organizational Capability management looks for optimally exploiting the internal resources to create significant assets for the organization. It aims at developing the aptitudes of organizations, more and more changing in a turbulent environment by coordinating the progressive learning of corporate good practices by all the organizational entities. This also helps decision-makers in their choice to launch a new project or reorganization. Finally, managing capabilities establishes mature HR processes and seasoned managers who are more task and vision-oriented than just handling capacities – which in reality is an administrative overhead. Focusing on capabilities can keep an organization ahead of the pack in quality and leading industry on its own terms. Capable resources create an innovative environment while just planning for capacity and filling in positions promote laziness and status quo.
An example framework to inherently tackle this problem? Agile.
–>SCRUM teams add capabilities while Sprints pull up the required capabilities to deliver a Sprint.
Sources:
PMI, The Standard for Portfolio Management, 4th Edition
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-organizational-capability-13295.html
http://learningpractice.blogspot.com/2011/09/capacity-planning-vs-capability.html
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