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 stating: 

• Which operations need to be performed by the system and in what order? 
• What will users be providing as inputs? 
• When will inputs become available in the operations timeline? 
• What are users expecting as outcomes as a result of using the system? 
• When are these outcomes needed, and what aspects are critical to achieving these aspects?

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:

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. Concept for new or modified system
   1. Background, objectives, and scope
   2. Operational policies and constraints
   3. Description of new system
   4. Stakeholders and affected personnel
   5. Support concept
4. Operational scenarios
5. Summary of impacts
   1. Operational impacts
   2. Organizational impacts
   3. Impacts during development
6. Analysis of the proposed system
   1. Summary of advantages
   2. Summary of disadvantages or limitations
   3. Summary of alternatives and tradeoffs considered