What you sell, what you intend to do about it, and what you have to be good at.
Three registers and one join. What the business offers, the initiatives it is actually running, and a capability model you author yourself. The join is the part that matters: a product names the capabilities it needs, a capability names the processes and systems that support it, and an initiative names both the capability it uplifts and the objective it advances. So "why are we doing this?" has an answer you can follow rather than assert.
Four steps, and the fourth is the one nobody does — which is why the first three stop meaning anything about eight months in.
Products and services, each with an owner and a state — in development, active, retired. The retired ones matter as much as the rest.
Objectives come with the core, with the KPIs that say whether you are getting there. This module attaches the work to them.
Initiatives with a start, a target and a progress figure, laid out against the outcomes they advance.
What the business must be able to do, rated one to five, and which processes and systems support each one.
Three questions, asked continuously, that nobody asks of a slide deck: which outcomes have nothing behind them; which outcomes had initiatives and every one of them was cancelled; and which initiatives are aligned to no outcome at all.
Each is a different failure. An outcome with nothing behind it was never resourced. An outcome whose initiatives were all cancelled was abandoned without anybody saying so — the worst of the three, because the objective is still on the board. And an initiative aligned to nothing is work the business is paying for and cannot explain.
None of those is visible from a list of initiatives, and all three are derived from the records you already keep rather than from a status report somebody writes.
Illustration — not a real workspace.
A maturity rating from one to five. The target is set by the initiative that intends to raise it, not on the capability itself — because two initiatives can intend two different levels and a single field would hold only whichever was saved last.
Core, support or management — so the model says which capabilities the business competes on and which merely have to work.
The processes and systems that support it. A capability with nothing supporting it is an intention; this is where that becomes visible.
The risks attached to it, if you run the Risk & Compliance module. A capability you depend on and have not protected is worth knowing about.
A product or service requires capabilities. A capability is supported by processes and systems. A process is owned, documented and measured in the core. So the chain from "we sell this" to "this is who does it and how" is a set of links you can follow in the product — in either direction.
That is the question most businesses cannot answer in a hurry: if this offering doubled, what breaks? Follow the links and the answer is a short list of named processes with named owners — and processes carry a current and a target maturity of their own, on the record, so the gap is a number rather than an impression.
You do not have to start the capability model from nothing. Two starter models ship with Grace — a general business capability model, and one built on the APQC Process Classification Framework — and you adopt one into your workspace and edit it from there. The adopted copy records which template and version it came from, so an improved template can be offered to you rather than missed.
Illustration — not a real workspace.
It is not a project management tool. There are no task dependencies, no critical path, no resource levelling and no timesheets. An initiative here is a commitment with an owner, a target and a progress figure — if you need to run the work itself, run it where you run it and keep the commitment here.
It does not score your strategy, rank your initiatives or tell you what to fund. It makes the gaps visible and leaves the decision where it belongs.
The starter models are a starting point and not an answer. A capability model you adopted and never edited describes somebody else's business, and it is the one abandoned in a quarter — so the first real pass over it is a day's work with the people who actually do the job, and that is consulting rather than a download.
And the roadmap is a layout of commitments, not a Gantt chart. If what you want is a dependency-resolved schedule, this will disappoint you and we would rather say so now.
The one with the five priorities on page two. Thirty minutes is usually enough to find which of them has nothing behind it.