The Concept of Operations, or CONOPS, is a Capabilities Needs Assessment investigation to gain a Users' and Stakeholders' perspective on a major change initiative. As such, it is both an analysis and a formal document that describes high-level capabilities requirements that have been identified as necessary to achieve the mission of the IT organization, and its subordinate organizations.

The CONOPS is primarily used as a communications document by the internal business customers. The CONOPS may also be used to help coordinate development of business cases as inputs to a Request for New Applications and/or Business Requirements Documents (BRD).

The purpose of the CONOPS is to help internal customer's better express their business needs, in terms of capabilities required, and should therefore be process focused and system agnostic. If IT Systems needs are identified, the CONOPS can serve as a business needs assessment document.

In that scenario, the CONOPS is a useful component within the project planning activities associated with the Concept/Initiation Phase of the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

The CONOPS provide direction for identifying parameters in the following areas:

        Capabilities needed
        Operation and Support Description
        Justification for and Nature of Change
        Potential Impacts
        Concepts for a Proposed System
        Scenarios
        Functional Capabilities
        Summary of Impacts
        Analysis of the Proposed System.

Scroll down to the Concept of Operations example below.