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# Overview of business capability planning

# Overview of business capability planning {#ariaid-title1}

* Release version: Yokohama
* 
* Updated January 30, 2025
* 
* ![](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ico-clock) 1 minute to read

Capability-based planning directs toward planning, designing, and delivering effective plans of action to improve business capabilities in a business enterprise. The effective implementation of capability-based planning lies
with the roles of business personas such as the business owner, application portfolio owner, and capability planner in understanding the existing capabilities and in planning to fill the technical gaps.  
Important:  
Starting with the Xanadu release, the business capability module is moved to the Enterprise Architecture Workspace. To learn more, see [Manage business capabilities](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/K~T2j88eHDnQu_jwmjXZlg "A business capability is the ability of an organization to do its business activities successfully and fulfill its business goals.").

Capability-based planning is a mechanism to better understand how to map strategic plans to your investments. If your capabilities are well-defined, then your organization structure aligns to those capabilities, because the
capability defines what the organization does.

Business capability is a configuration item (CI) that helps to understand how the business
capability is supported by the related applications and services.

Capability-based planning is structured as a hierarchy and supports up to six levels of capabilities in its series, which means a parent capability can have six levels of sub-capabilities beneath its level. However, a capability in
each level of the hierarchy can have as many capabilities as its siblings at its own level and each one can have one-to-many relationships between the levels.

## Personas governing capability based planning {#overview-business-capability-planning__section_pmc_zyk_z1b}

Following are the personas with appropriate roles to use capability-based planning:

Business owner

:   As a business owner it is important that you perceive the existing capabilities and work
    out strategies to identify the areas that need investments to plan for better allocation of
    expenses on projects.

Application portfolio owner

:   As an application portfolio owner, you have to identify those capabilities that impact your
    business applications and address them, so that the business applications function
    effectively.

Capability planner

:   As a capability planner, you have to establish capabilities in the light of the industry norms of applying procedures that have been termed as a best practice, being most effective and yielding the best results.

## What to do next {#overview-business-capability-planning__section_gk4_w2z_2bb}

Use the [capability
map](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/YUu2tc0QHaNPabO5t4vIGA "Capability-based planning helps you to understand your business capabilities, and the business applications that support them, to achieve your business goals.") for planning investments in applications.