impact mapping

What is an impact map?

Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique. It prevents organisations from getting lost while building products, services and delivering projects. It does this by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and making better roadmap decisions. Impact maps are created collaboratively with stakeholders across the organisation and can be aided by including vendors and suppliers, among others. It is a mind-map grown during a discussion facilitated by answering the following six questions: 1. Why? 2. Who? 3. How? 4. What?----The last two sections are additions to impact mapping that our clients have found useful over the years.----5. When?6. Where? It often helps to answer the following questions prior to answering question 1(Why) as the proceeding questions set the scene. 1. What is driving the need for change? 2.What is the behaviour that you want to change? 3. What is the new behaviour you want to see?

Establish Goals :

Why are we doing this?*Guidance* Gary Klien's research with emergency services and military personnel shows that people on the ground have to know the objectives of any activity in order to react correctly to unforeseen problems. *Key questions*1. Why are we doing this? *Getting it right* 1. The Purpose is to enable stakeholders to re-evaluate the plan as new in formation becomes available. 2. Goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Action-orientated, Realistic, and Timely) 3. Goals should not be about delivering products, services, projects or specific requirements. Rather they should focus on behaviours or outcomes that the organisation desires to change, whilst identifying the added value that will be materialised. 4. Goals should present a problem, not a solution.------*Examples*

Identify actors: Who can influence the outcome?

*Guidance* Gerald Weinberg defined quality as 'value delivered to some person(s)'. To deliver high-quality results, we first have to understand who these people are, and what kind of value they are looking for from our products, services and project outcomes. In addition to those directly getting value from your products, services and/or project outcomes, we also have to consider a host of others who can make decisions that influence the success of iterations, experiments, milestones and/or outcomes. *Key questions* 1. Who can help to produce the desired effect? 2. Who can obstruct it? 3. Who are the consumers or users of our product? 4. Who will be impacted by it? *Getting it right* Important actors are those who can significantly influence the success of a product, service or project iteration, experiment and milestone, including end-users and internal or external decision-makers. Alistair Cockburn advises looking for three types of actors: 1. Primary actors, whose goals are fulfilled e.g. endusers 2. Secondary actions, who provides services e.g. Call Centre teams, UX/UI Designers, 3. Off-stage actors, who have an interest in the behaviours, but are not directly benefiting or providing a service e.g. Board Members, Regulators, Suppliers, Legal. 4. Be specific, avoid generic terms such as 'users' because each user group is likely to have different objectives. It is also worth noting that not all users of a system maybe important during decision making------*Examples*

Create impacts : How can actors help or hinder?

*Guidance* Anthony Ulwick wrote that a key to successful delivery is to understand the job(s) that need to be done for the customer, instead of listening to solutions presented by actors. This helps organisations to explore solutions to get the customer’s job done, instead of focusing on features. Robert Brinkerhoff suggests something similar, but focusing on desired changes in jobs instead of just jobs that users are trying to achieve. By describing how you want the actor’s behaviour to change, organisations are able to assure value by aligning priorities and outcomes. By applying systems thinking to impact mapping, organisations can identify and mitigate the impact of detractors and maximise the contributions of helpers. Likewise, some impacts will conflict, compete and compliment. A systems thinking approach helps organizations to prioritise by considering the impact of pulling levers. The impact map shows who creates an impact and how that contributes to the goal. Now you're empowered todecide which impacts best contribute to the goal and protect the initiative from scope screepand HIPO syndrome. *Key questions* 1. How should our actors' behaviour change? 2. Howcan they help us to achieve the goal? 3. How can they obstruct or prevent us from succeeding? *Getting it right* Important actors are those who can significantly influence the success of a product, service or project iteration, experiment and milestone, including end-users and internal or external decision-makers. Alistair Cockburn advises looking for three types of actors: 1. Don't list everything an actor wants to achieve. List only the impacts thatreally help move you in the right direction towards the central goal. 2. Impacts are behaviourchanges-not software features, neither are they KPIs e.g. £5m in revenue. 3. Go beyondstating a behaviour and detail specifics e.g. subscribe via mobile vsubscribe on mobile within3 clicks.4. Consider positive and negative impacts------*Examples*