5 Strategic Business Capability Mistakes To Avoid

Matthew Bulat
4 min readDec 12, 2021

If you’re one of the business managers who is genuinely interested in how to overcome business strategy weaknesses, then here is the mistakes list you need to avoid.

The main idea of these 5 Mistakes is:

  1. Business strategy and capabilities need to work together
  2. Business capabilities are needed to achieve your balanced business strategy.

Truth: avoiding business strategy blindspots , however, an analysed business strategy is needed for success.

Mistake # 1 — Strategic Planning Without Knowing Core Capabilities

Your core business processes needs to be documented in terms of capabilities

Review the most used processes in your business. Identify the process experts used.

  • Interview
  • Audio record
  • Video
  • Document the best practices.

Note the skills and levels required. Test the best practice documentation with other qualified staff. Refine as required. Store the documented procedures where they can be easily accessed by the staff.

Include quality benchmarks and tolerances. Repeat this process for all the main processes in the business. Create an organisation that employs best practices and includes the documented processes and skills required to scale.

Strategy to execution needs capability modeling to achieve implementation

List the skills and capabilities required to fulfill the business activities. Note how activities are handed over between departments. Can efficiencies be introduced to streamline the process such as using modern technologies:

  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Sales Funnel Automation
  • Email Marketing
  • Enterprise Resource Planning
  • Global Supply Chain
  • Blockchain

Look for bottlenecks in the organisation including in management. Confirm the organisation can keep operating if any person is away. Know the capabilities and staffing needed to scale the business.

Mistake # 2 — Lacking Business Capability Maps And Level Capabilities

What capabilities and levels are needed to obtain strategy success

As a starting point, what are the entrepreneur, management, technical and IT skills needed for success. Your staff will have other skills that could help with your new strategy. Create a capabilities based map for your strategic goals.

Defined business capabilities can then be developed internally or sourced externally

A business capabilities assessment will identify a roadmap of requirements to reach your goals. This could include more space, new equipment, more staff, joint ventures, partners, contractors and new marketing channels. Knowing the capabilities gap and working to address it leads to strategy success.

Mistake # 3 — Missing Business Architecture For Competitive Advantage

What world’s best practices can be used from enterprise architecture styles

Look at the business leaders in your industry. Choose your business model styles. Then look across industries to see if any styles could work with your business.

Examples:

There are over 50 business model styles that could possibly apply to your business for competitive advantage.

Test aligned enterprise architects business styles with your business model strategy

A new business model needs its attributes tested. Confirm the new business model style works with your business. Measure the before and after results.

Check if KPIs improved with the new business attribute. Business model development and scaling requires iteration going forward.

Mistake # 4 — Business Strategy Blindspots

Review your current business health issues from 9 angles

Consider your business from costs, payments, competition, expenses, finance and revenue point of view. Each main category can be further divided into sub sections. Identify your business issue blindspots and then address them to fix your business baseline. See the conclusion to see all the categories and sub sections.

Review your future business strategy from 9 angles

Consider your strategy from a business, sales, marketing and team point of view. These main categories also have sub sections. Recognize that some of these subsections have not been considered before. Knowing the whole Business Strategy Checklist helps define what is important for your business strategy.

Mistake # 5 — No KPIs On Capabilities Which Enable Strategy Success

Measure your business in terms of people, process, customer and finance

Once your processes are in place then business intelligence can be used with KPIs to track business performance going forward. Examples:

  • Production per day
  • Sales per day
  • Products made per employee
  • Stock on hand
  • Product turnover
  • Sales by region
  • Sales per customer…

Daily KPIs allow for quicker business decisions based on data.

Declare your strategic vision and the milestones to achieve success

Define your milestones to vision success and then break that down into a list of activities to achieve. Document your strategy clearly for internal distribution initially. Gather feedback and refine if required.

Then advise your external stakeholders, partners and supplies. Marketing messaging may need to change to distribute vision to the wider community.

So the thing for you to do here is to review your business strategy from multiple angles.

One more thing. Did you realize, if you really want to gain business outcomes, solve strategy weaknesses, this amazing free report spells it all out for you! Check it out here Your Business Capability

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Matthew Bulat

I help struggling organisations to leverage technology for more business. Using my business transformation services, you will gain digital competitive advantage