Capability Modeler Guide

💡 Key Concepts

The Capability Modeler is built around a small set of objects that work together:

• Model — the top-level container. One model = one capability map for an organization or domain.
• Capability Group — a column or cluster of related capabilities (e.g. "Customer Management").
• Capability — an individual business capability inside a group (e.g. "Customer Onboarding"). Each capability can carry maturity scores across four dimensions and a calculated priority score.
• View — a filtered window onto the model. The Default view always shows every capability; custom views let you highlight a subset.
• Strategy — a named initiative that marks certain capabilities as strategically important. Strategy alignment drives both heat-map border coloring and the priority score.

🗂 Models

Create a model

Click + New Model in the left sidebar. Give it a name — this is usually the organization or domain the map represents.

Switch models

Select any model from the list in the sidebar. The canvas and all dropdowns update immediately.

Rename or delete

Hover over a model name in the sidebar to reveal edit and delete actions. Deleting a model permanently removes all its groups, capabilities, views, and strategies.

📦 Capability Groups

Groups are the top-level columns of your map. Think of them as capability domains or value streams.

Add a group

1. Select a model in the sidebar.
2. Click Model ▾ in the toolbar and choose Add Capability Group….
3. Enter a number and label, then confirm. The new group appears on the canvas.

Reorder and resize groups

Drag a group header to move it on the canvas. Drag the edges to resize. Positions are saved automatically.

Delete a group

Select the group on the canvas and press Delete or Backspace. Groups can only be deleted when they contain no capabilities.

⬡ Capabilities

Capabilities are the individual items inside a group. Each capability can carry a rich set of metadata: type, description, stewardship information, and maturity scores.

Add a capability

1. Click Model ▾ → Add Capability….
2. Choose the parent group from the dropdown.
3. Enter a number, label, and optional fields.

Edit a capability

Double-click any capability node on the canvas to open the edit dialog. The dialog lets you update:

• Number & Label — the identifier and display name shown on the canvas node.
• Type — Core (shown as a blue C badge) or Supporting (grey S badge).
• Description — free-text context about the capability.
• Stewardship — the person and department responsible for this capability.
• External Key — a reference identifier linking to an external system (e.g. a portfolio tool, JIRA project, or cost center code).
• Current Investment — the current spend or budget allocated to this capability.
• Last Investment — the investment in the previous period, for comparison.
• Cost — the cost to operate this capability without change, including people, process, tools, and information. Sizes rectangles in the Simplification Opportunity Treemap.
• Complexity — a 1–100 rating of how complex the capability is to run or change. Also used by the Treemap.
• Priority — a read-only calculated score (see the Priority section).
• Maturity Dimensions — scored values for People, Process, Tools, and Information (see the Maturity section).

Delete a capability

Select the capability node on the canvas and press Delete or Backspace. A confirmation prompt will appear.

📊 Maturity

Every capability can be scored across four dimensions, each on a scale of 1 – 10. Each dimension has two scores: Measured (current state) and Desired (target state).

The four dimensions

• People — skills, roles, capacity, and organizational structure.
• Process — the maturity of the workflows, procedures, and governance that govern the capability.
• Tools — the systems, platforms, and technology that support the capability.
• Information — the quality, availability, and governance of data and knowledge.

Overall maturity

The Overall row in the edit dialog is calculated automatically from the four dimension scores using the model's Maturity Formula. The default formula is the floor average of all four dimensions:

Math.floor((people + process + tools + information) / 4)

You can customize this formula in Model Settings.

Heatmap coloring

When the Heatmap ON toggle (bottom of the sidebar) is active, each capability node is filled with a color on a smooth amber-to-red gradient that reflects the gap between its desired and measured overall maturity — the same color scale used by the Simplification Opportunity Treemap's priority coloring, for a consistent visual language across the app:

• Amber — gap of 0 (at or above target)
• Muted orange — a gap around the middle of the tracked range
• Deep red — gap of 9 or more (the largest gap the scale tracks)

The color shifts continuously between these — there are no fixed bands, so two capabilities with slightly different gaps get slightly different shades.

🔢 Priority

Each capability has a Priority score that combines two signals into a single number: how much improvement is needed (the maturity gap), and how strategically important the capability is (the number of strategies aligned to it).

How priority is calculated

The default formula is:

gap * strategies

Where gap is max(0, desired − measured) and strategies is the total count of strategies that include this capability. A capability with a large gap that is central to many strategic initiatives will receive a high priority score.

Where priority is shown

• Canvas node — a small purple badge appears in the top-right corner of any capability node with a priority score greater than zero.
• Edit dialog — the Priority field at the top of the capability editor shows the calculated score and the inputs used: gap N × M strategies.

Customizing the formula

You can change the priority formula for each model independently in Model Settings.

⚙️ Model Settings

Click Model ▾ in the toolbar → Model Settings… to open the settings for the current model. (The same menu also has Model Levels… and Heatmap Color Set….) It has four sections: two customizable formulas, the weighting and currency behind the Simplification Opportunity Treemap, and a PPTX export scale factor.

Maturity Formula

Controls how the four dimension scores (people, process, tools, information) are combined into a single Overall maturity value. The formula is evaluated separately for the Measured and Desired sides.

Available variables: people, process, tools, information. All JavaScript Math.* functions are available.

Priority Formula

Controls how a capability's Priority score is calculated from the maturity gap and strategy alignment count.

Available variables: gap (desired − measured, minimum 0) and strategies (count of strategies that include this capability). All JavaScript Math.* functions are available.

Simplification Opportunity Treemap weights

Also in Model Settings: a Currency selector for the Cost field, and Cost Weight / Complexity Weight values (0–1) controlling how much each attribute contributes to a rectangle's size in the Simplification Opportunity Treemap. The two weights always sum to 1 — changing one automatically adjusts the other.

PPTX export scale factor

A Horizontal / Vertical scale factor (default 1.3 in each direction) that corrects for a rendering discrepancy where the canvas-to-PowerPoint export otherwise renders visibly smaller than specified. Increase it if your exported slides don't fill the slide.

👁 Views

Views let you focus on a subset of the capability map — useful for presentations to specific audiences.

The Default view

Every model has one Default view that always shows all capabilities. It cannot be deleted or filtered.

Create a custom view

Click + New View in the sidebar (with a model selected). Name the view, then use the Model ▾ toolbar menu → Capabilities in this view… to add or remove capabilities.

Switch views

Select any view from the sidebar. The canvas instantly shows only the capabilities belonging to that view.

🎯 Strategies

A strategy is a named program or initiative. Capabilities are assigned to it to highlight where investment or focus is directed. Strategy alignment also feeds into each capability's Priority score.

Create a strategy

Click + New Strategy in the sidebar. Give it a meaningful name such as "Digital Transformation 2026".

Assign capabilities to a strategy

1. Select the strategy in the sidebar (it will be highlighted blue).
2. Click Model ▾ in the toolbar → Capabilities in this strategy….
3. Check capabilities in the modal and choose whether each is Direct or Indirect — direct links represent capabilities the strategy primarily depends on, indirect links represent supporting dependencies.

Selecting multiple strategies

You can select more than one strategy in the sidebar at the same time. All highlighted capabilities from all selected strategies are shown simultaneously on the canvas. Capabilities in multiple strategies receive a double-outline badge.

Strategy contribution types

• Direct — the capability is a primary deliverable or dependency of the strategy. Shown with a green border.
• Indirect — the capability is a supporting dependency. Shown with an amber border.

Strategy capability count

When a view is selected, each strategy in the sidebar shows a small blue badge displaying the count of its capabilities that are visible in the current view. For the Default view the badge reflects the total number of capabilities assigned to the strategy regardless of view filtering.

🧩 Proposed Portfolios

A Proposed Portfolio of Programs turns the maturity gaps you've already identified through Strategies into a concrete set of investment Programs — each one a named group of capability-gap improvements, with its own OKRs — that you can refine and hand to stakeholders as a roadmap.

Why generate more than one

A model can hold several proposed portfolios at once. Generating a portfolio never changes the underlying model, capabilities, or maturity scores — it only reads the strategies and gaps that already exist and bundles them into programs. That makes it safe to build more than one from the exact same heat map, for example to:

• Compare a conservative bundling of gaps into a few large programs against an aggressive one that spreads the same gaps across many smaller, parallel programs.
• Propose separate portfolios for different sponsors or budget cycles — e.g. an IT-led grouping and a business-led grouping of the same underlying gaps.
• Explore alternative program groupings before committing to one, without redoing the strategy/gap analysis each time.

Create a proposed portfolio

1. Select a model, then type a name in the New proposed portfolio… box in the Proposed Portfolios section of the sidebar and confirm.
2. If the model has no strategies yet, you'll see a warning and the portfolio won't be created — strategies are what the wizard reads to find capabilities and their gaps. Add strategies and link capabilities to them first (see Strategies).
3. The new portfolio opens straight into the Proposed Programs Wizard.

Using the wizard

The wizard is a free-form workspace, not a linear sequence — browse strategies in any order while building up several draft programs in parallel.

• Left rail — strategies. Click a strategy to see its impacted capabilities. The badge next to each strategy counts its capability gaps that aren't yet assigned to any draft program, and turns green once that count reaches zero.
• Center — impacted capabilities. Capabilities linked to the selected strategy are listed by priority (same gap × strategies formula as the Priorities report), each with a chip per maturity dimension (People / Process / Tools / Information).
• Right rail — draft programs. Add a draft program by name, then click it to make it the active program.
• With a program active, click a dimension chip on any capability to add that gap area to the active program as an improvement. A chip already claimed by another draft program is greyed out and shows which program has it — one gap area can only belong to one program at a time. Use the Move… dropdown next to an improvement in the right rail to re-assign it to a different draft program, or the ✕ to remove it.
• Double-click a capability's name to open its full edit dialog without leaving the wizard.
• Rename or delete a draft program using the pencil/trash icons next to it — deleting a program releases its improvements so they can be claimed by another one.

Generating the portfolio

Generate Portfolio becomes available once every draft program has at least one improvement. Before it runs, it checks for two things and, if found, shows them in a confirmation dialog you can review or override:

• A gap claimed by more than one program — shouldn't normally happen given the one-program-per-chip rule, but can occur if you move things around; flagged so you can double-check the split makes sense.
• Unaddressed gaps — a capability gap linked to some strategy that no draft program has claimed.

You can go back and fix these, or click Generate Anyway to proceed regardless.

The Program Board

Once generated, selecting a portfolio shows the Program Board — one column per program, each listing its improvements.

• Double-click an improvement to edit its name, Objective, and Key Results.
• Click ✎ OKRs in a program's column header to edit the whole program's OKRs. Unlike an improvement (one Objective, one set of Key Results), a program can carry multiple Objectives, each with its own list of Key Results.
• Rename or delete the portfolio itself from the sidebar, the same way as a view or strategy.

Exporting a portfolio vs. exporting the report

The Program Board and the Portfolio Report are two different exports, built for two different purposes:

🖼 Working the Canvas

Pan and zoom

• Pan: Click and drag on an empty area, or use the scroll wheel to move horizontally/vertically.
• Zoom: Pinch on a trackpad, or hold Ctrl and scroll. Use the zoom controls in the bottom-right corner.
• Fit to screen: Press Ctrl Shift F or click the fit button in the controls.

Move elements

Drag any group or capability node to reposition it. Layouts are saved automatically when you release.

Select multiple nodes

Hold Shift and click to multi-select, or draw a selection box on an empty area of the canvas.

Reading capability badges

Each capability node can display up to three badges in the corner:

• Purple number — the calculated priority score (shown when > 0).
• C — the capability is marked as Core type.
• S — the capability is marked as Supporting type.

⚡ Auto Layout

Click Model ▾ → Auto Layout in the toolbar to automatically arrange all groups and capabilities into a clean grid. This is useful after adding many capabilities at once or when the canvas has become disorganised.

🌡 Heatmap Coloring

The canvas supports two layers of coloring that can be active at the same time.

Maturity heatmap (background fill)

Click Heatmap OFF at the bottom of the sidebar to enable maturity coloring. Each capability node fills with a color on a continuous amber-to-red gradient based on the gap between its desired and measured overall maturity — the larger the gap, the deeper red the fill:

• Amber — gap of 0 (at or above target)
• Muted orange — a gap around the middle of the tracked range
• Deep red — gap of 9 or more (the largest gap the scale tracks)

Capabilities with no maturity scores show a neutral grey fill instead.

Strategy highlight (border color)

When one or more strategies are selected in the sidebar, capabilities assigned to those strategies receive a colored border:

• Green border — direct alignment to the selected strategy.
• Amber border — indirect alignment.
• Double outline — the capability appears in more than one of the currently selected strategies.

Both layers can be active together: a capability can show a red fill (large maturity gap) with a green border (direct strategic alignment), immediately communicating that it is both highly important and significantly below target.

📤 Exporting

Click File ▾ in the toolbar to export the current view.

PowerPoint (PPTX)

Exports the canvas as a fully editable PowerPoint slide. Each capability group and capability is an individual shape — no rasterisation, no reformatting. This is the recommended format for stakeholder presentations.

PNG / JPG

Exports a high-resolution image of the current canvas. Useful for embedding in documents or wikis.

Print

Choose Print… from the File menu. The canvas is captured as an image and opened in a new browser tab with your system's print dialog. This lets you print directly or save as a PDF using your browser's built-in PDF printer.

📋 CSV Import & Export

Export CSV

Click File ▾ → Export CSV to download the full capability list as a spreadsheet. Group rows and capability rows share the same Number / Label columns (a group row simply leaves the capability-only columns blank). The exported columns, in order, are:

• Number, Label, Description, Type
• Steward Name, Steward Dept, Steward Email
• Maturity Measured, Maturity Desired — the overall calculated values
• People Measured/Desired, Process Measured/Desired, Tools Measured/Desired, Information Measured/Desired — the individual dimension scores
• Last Investment, Current Investment — spend values for the previous and current periods
• Cost, Complexity
• External Key — the identifier linking to an external system
• Round-Trip ID, Round-Trip Parent ID — hidden bookkeeping columns (see below) that let a later re-import match this exact row instead of creating a duplicate

Import CSV

Click File ▾ → Import CSV… and select a file. You will be shown a column-mapping screen so you can match your spreadsheet columns to the capability fields, with a live preview of the first few rows — you do not need to use a specific column order or naming convention. Only Number and Label are required.

Field reference

What each mappable field expects:

* Required.

Re-importing updates, it doesn't duplicate

Importing a file that overlaps with what's already in the model updates the matching rows in place rather than creating duplicates. Which rows count as "matching" depends on the file:

• By Round-Trip ID (recommended) — if the file has the hidden Round-Trip ID columns populated (i.e. it's a file you exported from this app), rows are matched by that durable ID. This still works correctly even if you've renumbered capabilities or moved them to a different group since exporting. If the file is missing an item that was previously imported this way, you'll be prompted to either keep it in the model or delete it to match the file exactly.
• By Number (a hand-built file) — if the file has no Round-Trip ID columns, rows are matched against existing capabilities/groups by their Number within the model and updated in place.

Numbering conventions

The importer auto-detects which numbering convention your file uses — a file must use one consistently:

• Sequential (1, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, …) — a number ending in .0, or a bare integer, creates a group; other rows sharing the same leading integer become capabilities in that group.
• Prefixed (BC-3700, BC-3700.10, …) — a leading text prefix followed by a group number creates a group; <prefix><group>.<child> creates a capability in that group. Group and child numbers don't need to be sequential.

🔗 Sharing

Models can be shared with other users at a configurable access level. Click Share in the toolbar, then use the Users or Share link tab.

Invite users by email

1. Click Share ▾ → Users.
2. Enter the invitee's email address and choose an access level from the dropdown.
3. Click Invite. The invitation is saved and an email notification is sent if the address is deliverable.

Access levels

Changing or removing access

Invited users are listed below the invite form. Use the dropdown next to any user to change their access level, or click the ✕ button to remove their access.

Share link

Click Share ▾ → Link, then click Get share link. Anyone who has the link and is signed in receives view-only access to the model automatically.

Click Copy to copy the URL to your clipboard. Click Revoke link to invalidate the current link — previously shared URLs will stop working immediately.

📋 Reports

The Reports ▾ toolbar menu provides five reports for the current model. Every report can be exported using its own Export to PDF / Export to PPTX buttons at the bottom of the dialog.

Change History

Click Reports ▾ → Change History to open the change log. It records every significant change made to the model, including:

• Model renames
• View and strategy creation
• Capability edits (label, maturity, stewardship)
• Changes to capabilities assigned to a view or strategy

Each entry shows the timestamp, the user who made the change, the type of action, and the affected entity. The log can be downloaded as a CSV for archiving or compliance purposes using the Download CSV button.

Priorities report

Click Reports ▾ → Priorities to open the Priorities report. This report ranks capabilities by their calculated priority score and shows the maturity gap and strategy alignment count that produced each score — useful for building a business case or roadmap.

Simplification Opportunity Treemap

Click Reports ▾ → Simplification Opportunity Treemap to see every capability with both Cost and Complexity set, drawn as a rectangle whose size and color each encode a different signal:

• Size — a weighted combination of the capability's cost and complexity, using the Cost Weight / Complexity Weight values in Model Settings. Bigger rectangles represent capabilities that are more expensive and/or more complex — the candidates most worth simplifying.
• Color — the capability's calculated Priority score, on a low-to-high color scale shown in the legend at the top of the report. A capability with no calculated priority (no strategy alignment or no maturity gap) renders in the neutral "no priority calculated" color, independent of its size.

Hover any rectangle to see its exact cost, complexity, and priority values. Capabilities missing either cost or complexity are left out of the chart entirely — a banner at the top tells you how many were excluded.

Completeness report

Click Reports ▾ → Completeness to see every capability that is missing a Cost, Complexity, Current State Maturity, or Desired State Maturity value — useful for finding gaps before a data-quality push or a stakeholder review. Each row shows the capability, its stakeholder (with a clickable email link), and the four tracked values — a value that hasn't been set shows a small ⚠ icon instead of a number.

Filtering by missing field

The four pill buttons at the top (Cost, Complexity, Current State Maturity, Desired State Maturity) let you narrow the list to capabilities missing specific fields, not just any field:

• Nothing selected (the default) — every capability that's missing at least one of the four values is shown.
• One pill selected — only capabilities missing that value are shown. For example, selecting Cost shows only capabilities with no cost set, regardless of whether their other fields are complete.
• Multiple pills selected — a capability only qualifies if it is missing all of the selected fields at once (this is an AND, not an OR). Selecting both Cost and Complexity shows only capabilities missing both — a capability missing just one of the two drops off the list.

Hover over any pill to see a tooltip describing exactly what selecting it does.

Other filters and sorting

• Stakeholder dropdown — narrows the table to one person's capabilities, or to capabilities with no steward assigned at all (— Unassigned —).
• Only capabilities with strategies — check this to hide capabilities that aren't linked to any strategy, focusing the report on gaps in capabilities that actually matter to your strategic initiatives.
• Column headers are sortable — click a header to sort by that column (missing values sort first, since finding them is the point of the report); click the same header again to reverse the sort.

Portfolio Report

Click Reports ▾ → Portfolio Report to open a structured report for any generated Proposed Portfolio — pick one from the dropdown at the top. See the Proposed Portfolios section for the full write-up of this report and how its export differs from the Program Board's own export buttons.