Concepts are powerful symbols of meaning in communications. They allow us to organize our knowledge and understanding within a particular context, and provide a framework for us to structure the objects which are involved in delivering value through a set of interactions over time. Concepts help us to integrate individual observations and phenomena into viable hypotheses and theories about the world. As we use them to communicate these theories, readers can then validate aspects about a system with their own beliefs and understandings, and assess the potential value of changes which are proposed, under consideration, or available for their usage.

A Concept of Operations document (ConOps) is an approach that is often used to summarize the value proposition to stakeholders of development projects. It is most frequently used within aerospace and defense applications, but is equally applicable to enterprise IT projects, change initiatives, and software-intensive applications. Within these environments, a graphical concept map is often first used to communicate information about the key concepts which are under consideration. However, the graphical depictions often must be narrated or walked through with supplemental descriptions in order for the underlying concepts to be consistently understood by different people or over different timeframes. Use case diagrams suffer similar ambiguity. 

 A ConOps provides value  by offering a 'big picture' perspective to the designers of the system which is often not available from the requirements alone. It does this by telling a story about different scenarios in which the system can be practically applied to produce business value. This can help developers to focus their design approach, and ensure that the design team's interpretation of the requirements is meaningful to the customer’s anticipated use of the product.

The ConOps weaves the associated concepts for a system into a story about how the anticipated physical and technical capabilities of the system are expected to be used to accomplish selected functions, such as resource or information aggregation, management, computation, production, distribution, and support, over time. It is presumed that these interactions collectively produce outcomes which enable the harvesting of business value by the system and its stakeholders.

The ConOps puts these interactions into a meaningful perspective by describing: 

• What outcomes are intended from using the system?
• What concepts are crucial to understand the system and realize these outcomes? 
• How do users apply these concepts in operating the system? 
• What will users need to provide to operate and maintain the system? 

The ConOps information is useful under many different domains and development methods. If more projects used a ConOps approach, their probability of success will be increased since the requirements elicitation process is given a focus and a description of what "done" looks like.

The following outline provides a suggested template for effectively communicating such information for a new or changed system. Items that are in bold can also be the focus of capturing an existing system's Conops, if it was not originally produced:

1. Current System or Situation
   1. Background, Objectives, and Scope
   2. Operational policies and constraints
   3. Description of current system or situation
   4. Stakeholders and affected personnel
2. Justification for and nature of changes
   1. Reason changes are necessary
   2. Description of needed changes
   3. Priorities of changes
   4. Changes considered but not included
   5. Constraints and assumptions
3. Concepts for new or modified system
   1. Background, objectives, and scope
   2. Operational policies and constraints
   3. Description of new system elements
      1. Block diagram
      2. Description of critical functions
      3. Description of primary interfaces
      4. Key timeline and interactions
4. Operational scenarios & modes
   1. Initialization
   2. Operations
   3. Support
   4. Modification
   5. Failures and service restoration
5. Summary of capabilities provided
   1. System execution
   2. Data management
   3. Operations management
   4. Systems management
6. Analysis of the proposed system
   1. Summary of benefits
   2. Summary of disadvantages or limitations
   3. Summary of alternatives and tradeoffs considered