In anticipation of their co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Jasmine Baten and Benita Huette, Strategic Capability Managers at Cigna, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out their interview in relation to their BBC co-presentation entitled, Building the Capability Practice – Multi-year Capability Roadmap.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: By using business capabilities, we are able to have a holistic view of a capability (people, process, data, and technology) and ensure we are closing gaps and maturing priority capabilities.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: Large organizations develop different processes over time – a lot of the challenge has been to get areas streamlined around capabilities while allowing for differences where needed.  Not all movement will be the same – certain areas will progress faster and that is okay.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Our team has been training in agile methodology and goals will be set over the next few months.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Celebrate small wins and educate, educate, educate.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: Stay consistent – use capabilities to keep a common language between business and IT groups.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: A business capability model – one area of success has been aligning project requirements to business capabilities.  This has resulted in more clear and concise requirement statements.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: Question: How do you make capability practice easy and relevant to an organization?

Answer: Think outside the box.  Deploy architecture practice without getting bogged down with lingo and by the book methodologies to make your practice relevant in your organization.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: Understand development and execution of a business capability model – don’t wait for a finished product to deploy in your organization.

—————————–

Don’t miss Jasmine and Benita’s co-presentation, Building the Capability Practice – Multi-year Capability Roadmap, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 from 2:00 to 3:00 pm.  Click here to register for attendance.