Capability Based Planning (CBP) provides a structured, repeatable way to understand how well your organization’s core capabilities are performing and where to focus improvement efforts. It helps teams move from intuition-driven decisions to evidence-based prioritization by assessing capabilities across People, Process, Technology, and Data.
When applied consistently, CBP becomes a foundation for aligning strategic goals, operational needs, and investment decisions. The result is a clearer view of what is holding the business back, where to invest next, and how improvements contribute to measurable outcomes over time.
In Ardoq, Capability Based Planning is supported by an out-of-the-box solution with pre-built templates, metamodels, and dashboards. This allows teams to deploy quickly and begin assessing capabilities, identifying gaps, and planning improvements without creating the framework from scratch.
Why Capability Based Planning Matters
Organizations often have a good understanding of their strategy but lack visibility into whether their underlying capabilities can support it. Without this insight, investment decisions may be reactive, fragmented, or influenced by opinions rather than evidence.
Capability Based Planning helps organizations:
Build a shared language between business and IT about what needs improvement and why.
Identify capability gaps objectively and prioritize based on measurable exposure.
Connect improvement actions to strategic goals, ensuring investments support outcomes.
Create a repeatable process for assessing, reviewing, and tracking capability maturity.
Enable more predictable and defensible planning cycles across teams.
When to Use Capability Based Planning
CBP is valuable whenever an organization needs to:
Understand where performance issues stem from in a structured way.
Prioritize improvements across teams, processes, or technologies.
Support strategy execution through aligned investment decisions.
Establish a consistent method for reviewing capability health over time.
Prepare for transformation, redesign operating models, or drive modernization initiatives.
It can be used as a standalone assessment method or combined with related approaches such as Business Health Checks, Solution Health Checks, and Strategy to Execution.
How Capability Based Planning Works in Ardoq
The Ardoq solution guides users through the end-to-end process:
1. Map Your Business Capabilities
Start by establishing the business capabilities that define what your organization does. These capabilities form the anchor for assessment and planning.
2. Identify Capability Gaps
Use pre-configured health check models to evaluate each capability across People, Process, Technology, and Data. Stakeholders capture concerns, importance, and performance levels, resulting in exposure scores that make gaps visible and comparable.
3. Assess and Prioritize
Exposure scores highlight which capabilities require attention. Teams can compare capabilities, understand root causes, and prioritize improvements based on strategic relevance and maturity needs.
4. Plan and Execute Improvements
Capability gaps are translated into Capability Deltas - clear, actionable improvement items. These Deltas can be linked directly to initiatives, enabling transparent planning, resource allocation, and execution tracking.
5. Review and Evolve
CBP supports periodic reassessment, helping the organization track improvement progress and adjust investment decisions as conditions change.
Note: Ardoq is a flexible platform that supports you no matter which journey you choose. The steps above require minimal configuration, but to get the most value from your efforts, we recommend using Ardoq’s pre-built solutions.
If you'd like an extended version, alternative tone, or more context, I can refine further.
Key Benefits
Capability Based Planning helps organizations:
Make investment decisions based on evidence, not intuition.
Align business and IT around a common view of capability performance.
Understand the “why” behind improvement efforts.
Create transparency in planning and remove duplication across portfolios.
Build confidence in decisions by connecting assessments to outcomes.
Getting Started
Because the solution is pre-built, teams can adopt the method quickly and begin assessing capability gaps within days, not months.
Learn more about this solution in the Purpose, Scope, and Rationale article and explore the metamodel.