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RedYabber IT Strategy Roadmap (Part 2/4)
RedYabber IT Strategy Roadmap (Part 2/4)

Capabilities and Courses of Actions

Chuen Seet avatar
Written by Chuen Seet
Updated over a week ago

In Part 1, Jenny defined her IT function's challenges and objectives.  In this Part, Jenny will focus on understanding which capabilities exist, what needs to change and what new capabilities she needs to implement in order to meet her objectives.  

In the Capabilities step, Jenny can review a list of pre-defined capability maps by clicking on the carousel, review each map and then decide which map is the closest match to her requirements.  In this case, Jenny has chosen the "Utility Service Provider" as her starting map as this matches closest to her current IT function capabilities.  Her thinking is that it would be easier for her to review a capability map for her current organization and then add to it rather than start with a more progressed map and remove capabilities.  Either way would work.

Mapping RedYabber's IT capability building blocks

Starting with the Utility Service Provider capability map, Jenny has further removed some capabilities, as she didn't think they were relevant to RedYabber.  She did, however, add some additional capabilities from the Jibility library, such as Innovation Management, Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management, as she thought these are important for her to support the business with managing a digital transformation program.

Jenny also created some new capabilities which were not in the existing Jibility library, such as Digital Marketing Platform.  See below for Jenny's RedYabber IT Capability Map.

When creating the capability map, Jenny has also taken time to assess each capability from a change perspective.  The color coding of each capability represents her final assessment and this is based on the following convention:

Linking capabilities to objectives

Once Jenny has drafted a capability map she can start linking each capability to an objective.  Doing so will help Jenny with understanding which objectives are delivered by which capabilities.  To link objectives with capabilities, Jenny can use the Link Objectives function in the Capabilities step.  She can simply drag an objective to a capability to tag it with the objective number, as shown below.

Assessing priority rating

The next step is to review each capability and determine priority rating.  Similar to Link Objectives, the Priority Rating function will allow Jenny to drag/drop a high, medium or low priority rating tag onto each capability to indicate the priority.

The priority rating tag can be interpreted in different ways.  For some organizations the priority rating is simply defined as what is most important to the organization.  For others, it is an indication of the investment priority.  You can decide which approach is more meaningful in your organization.  It is good practice to set a constraint such as "We have only 3 highs, 5 mediums, and 10 lows, so which capabilities should we allocate these to?".  This approach will force decision making and ensure you focus on what is important.

Given that Jenny does not have unlimited resources, she has decided that RedYabber can afford to invest 1 high, 3 mediums and 5 lows.  She gathered her team and stakeholders together to jointly agree where to allocate the priority.  This is a constraint that she has created to help her team and stakeholders focus and to ensure that they invest their resources in the right places. 

After reviewing her capability map, Jenny drafted the following priority as can be seen in the diagram below (green stars labelled with "H" for high priority, "M" for medium priority, and "L" for low priority)

Note, Digital Marketing Platform scores the high priority.  Jenny felt that for RedYabber to push into the global market, then it is critical that they have a platform for digital marketing as their future global sales channel are all online (previously their global sales were through distributors in each country).

Defining actions

Now that Jenny has a capability map for the RedYabber IT function, she can review each capability and determine what changes are required in order to meet the objectives.  This is done by selecting each capability (preferable by order of priority) and creating actions.

An action describes the step required to bridge the gap between the current capability and the future capability in order to meet the objectives.  For example, for the IT Leadership capability (in the diagram shown below), Jenny has created at least three actions.  A key action for Jenny is "Rebrand RedYabber IT and change perception" given the negative perceptions of IT by the business.

Note, Jibility will automatically indicate the capabilities where you should define actions with a red tick.  A red tick will automatically appear on capabilities that require change (low, medium, high or new) and is tagged with an objective or a priority rating.  For example, the Digital Marketing Platform has a red tick because it is new and it is tagged with an objective.

In Jibility, each action can be categorized as People, Process or Physical, depending on what category the action falls in to. As can be seen in the diagram above (by the symbol next to the action name), Jenny has categorized the "Rebrand RedYabber IT and change perception" and "Establish communications strategy" actions as  People, and the  "Improve engagement with the business" action as Process. 

A yellow tick on the capability map indicates that Jenny has created at least one action for the capability, but she has not marked it as complete.  When Jenny has completed defining actions for a capability, she can click on the green tick to indicate that it is completed.

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