Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique. It helps companies to follow their goal in order to not get lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communication assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions. The goal of impact mapping is to visualize the dynamic relationship between delivery plans and the world around them, capturing the most important assumptions as well as delivery scope. This method helps to adapt plans effectively and react to change while still providing a good road map for delivery teams and a big picture view. Furthermore, everyone can apply this method without any specific knowledge and it is perfectly suitable for heterogeneous groups in a business.
For whom is it applicable?
Basically, impact mapping is used for user experience and strategy design. Moreover, also other industries started using it like for example the DevOps community, as it helps facilitate workshops and generate ideas, align stakeholders in IT projects, improve problem-solving within teams, defined testing strategies, and even implement large-scale organizational improvements.
Why is it used?
This method is used very often because it is very fast! Teams have the possibility to turn ideas into features. This event helps as well for team-building as it facilitates collaboration and participation among people from different backgrounds. This method gives the possibility to visualize assumptions and teams are able to see organizational alignment around the big picture.
How does impact map work?
As in the picture above everything starts with:
Why? Here, the goal and the purpose of the project is defined.
Who? Questions, like who are the users or consumers, who is impacted, who can help this effort and who can block it.
How? The players from the “who” branch is linked to the perspective of the business goal. How can the behaviour of players help the organization to meet the goal, how can they prevent or obstruct the team from succeeding, etc.
What? What can the team deliver as an organization, to support the required impacts, what are features and organizational activities one need to do in order to achieve the business goal, etc.
In the end, the relationship between the impact map is created and user stories will be created out of the picture designed.
Impact mapping helps to reduce waste by preventing scope creep and over-engineered solutions. The method provides focus for delivery by putting deliverables in the context of impacts they are supposed to achieve. It helps as well to ensure that the right business outcomes are achieved or that unrealistic projects are stopped before they become very costly, by clearly communication underlying assumptions and allowing teams to test them.
Sources: https://opensource.com/article/18/4/how-impact-mapping http://www.wolter.biz/2014/05/impact-mapping-eine-methode-zwei-sichtweisen/ https://www.impactmapping.org/about.html
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