Ben Winter-Giles

Good evening everyone!

Diving straight in, Capability profiles.

These are a fantastic little doodad which are very very useful for figuring out what a project has to deliver.

Often I’ve found myself starting off a project, and jumping straight into outcomes as derived from a vision statement.Something like this:

Vision: “We want a better online presence to improve the front end of our business.”

Outcomes: “well, lets build you information pages, and build in a blog, with an events calendar….” and so on.

But there is a critical step in there that often gets missed.

And it’s fiendishly easy to do, and very very valuable.

A capability profile is a set of statements, which can describe in plain English, almost conversational terms, what capability is needed once the project is done.

Eh?

Well, my learned friends a capability profile would look something like this for a fictitious company.

Capability profile

For: That Company over yonder.com.

1. Ability to be able to offer time limited sale opportunities to our clients.

2. Ability to be able to offer special online services to a member group.

3. Ability to manage that membership group, and send out email offers and other sales or marketing materials.

4. Ability to maintain the content and page structure ourselves.

5. Ability to have a photo gallery of our products.

6. to have purchase oriented transactions be performed through the site.

And so on….What this gives you as the developer / designer / whatever, is a really useful communications tool to use with your client to help them define exactly what the site is going to do.

But absolves both / all parties of needing to look carefully into what is going to be built exactly.

In Agile managed projects (and waterfall ones for that matter), the capability profile can be used as a single point of truth, owned by the Design Authority role (see my slide share on Natural Project Management With Notes or Without Notes)

Now, clarity around what the end state capability should be is really useful in a financial sense as well, becuase particularly with Agile developments, having clarity of vision can really save the development team a lot of money and time.

I should note as an ending statement, the capability profile is NOT a static document, and should be reviewed by both the project team and the owners at every iteration.

Particularly in an agile development, because as we all know, because agile is so powerful new desires for more capability come up ALL the time.

To support anyone who is interested, I have a neat little set of .PPT / .KEY worksheets and a workshop agenda process which are great to use to help work through the development of your capability and outcomes profile.

If you’d like to get your hands on it, drop me a line!