Impact Mapping
Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps teams understand why they are doing things and what impact they would like to achieve for certain roles, actors or Personas.
The maps provide a context and relationship to the deliverables in order to achieve the desired impacts for groups of people that achieves the goal. Without this sense of context and relationship deliverables can be a collection of features that do not form a cohesive approach to achieving the goals.
Step 1 Goals
Stating the strategic goal helps to align the activities and indicates the reasons why this initiative is being done. It should be concise, make sense, and be easily understood by the teams undertaking the work.
When stating the goals of the project try to avoid listing items to be delivered, and instead, focus on providing a statement of the intent with a clear definition of why the product is needed.
A good technique if goals seem to be too low level is to "ladder up" in a similar way to using the 5 Whys by keep asking questions such as "Why is this feature important?", "Why do we need this user experience?", "Why is this initiative necessary?".
Metrics are also useful to measure how successful are you in achieving the goals, and it can be quite polarising to determine some objective measures that will inform you of your progress towards the goals.
Another good practice is to determine what your first milestone may look like and what achievement or goal would be appropriate at what time. Try not to get too carried away with a high fidelity road map with lots of milestones, dates and times, but instead, try to think of only 1 to 3 milestones and provide enough room for adaptation as the project progresses.
Step 2 Actors
Actors represent who will either be a recipient of the delivered product or influence the outcome. Good questions to ask include "Who is going to be impacted by this?", "Who can help?", "Who can obstruct us?" to help form who the actors are going to be be in the impact map.
Actors could be direct or indirect beneficiaries of the product such as direct end customers or indirect service providers for example. An additional classification of actors may be those that are independent of the product such as regulatory bodies for example, who by their presence can have a significant impact on the product. It's always good to try to think of alternative actors and their motivations etc. to provide a more rounded impact map as well as think about key influencing scenarios that may affect the end product.
Try to avoid using generic terms such as "User" and instead look to identify specific groups, roles or people who are the main actors in your product delivery.
As you begin to draw the map and form relationships feel free to "ladder up" and re-check that the goals are still sensible, and "ladder down" to decompose a bit further. Try not to go too far though and over cook it. Just enough to explore a little above and below.
Step 3 Impacts
The impacts are how outcomes can be achieved for the actors that will either change their behaviours, influence the delivery or obstruct the delivery of the product or initiative. Good questions to ask at this point include "What behaviour changes do we want to influence?", "How can they help us?", "How will they hinder us?".
Avoid listing everything the actors may want, but instead focus only on impacts that are going to contribute to the overall goals. Good impacts will be those that also indicate a change in behaviour of the actors.
Also, try to consider negative or hindering impacts in addition to positive impacts as this will provide a more rounded approach to achieving the goals.
Step 4 Deliverables
The deliverables are what is needed for the actors to realise their impacts, and can answer questions such as "What can we do to achieve the impact?", "What do we need to do to avoid the impact?".
Try to avoid doing too much planning and decomposition up front, and instead, settle on an initial backlog of deliverables to achieve the goal that can then be enhanced iteratively. This will allow the backlog of deliverables to accommodate change and adaptation over time as more is known about the product. Trying to be too specific at the start can introduce assumptions into the backlog and so try to strike a right balance between just enough to get started with enough room for new ideas to emerge over time.
Also, don't try to deliver all of the deliverables in the map, but instead focus on the shortest path to achieve the goals. A good way to do this is to dot vote on the best way forwards to identify the easiest options to get off the ground, the riskiest options that need time to help resolve them and the exciters that would wow the end customer. Think strategically about the most appropriate way forwards rather than just doing everything.
At this point you might like to also use Story Mapping as a technique to organise the deliverables into options and priorities across the user experience to achieve the impacts and the goals.
Step 4 Rinse & Repeat
Check in every so often and determine if the goals still stand and are still relevant. Feel free to adjust the Actors, Impacts and Deliverables as needed over time to foster an emerging understanding of what is needed to achieve the goals. Keep things lean rather than bloating out, and look for opportunities to rationalise the backlog into something more appropriate and more efficient at reaching your goals sooner.
Divergent Convergent Thinking
Initially when drawing up the impact map it is ok to begin to diverge and "bloat" out the map. However, after a certain point it may be more productive to begin to refine back the map by combining elements and removing surplus elements from the map to provide a more crystallised view if the map. Less means more, in that, the more things are removed, the more emphasis the remaining items have and the more important and relevant they are.
Alternatives
Additional alternatives are to create multiple layers of impact maps for arranging the goals for larger organisations or initiatives, in that, deliverables at the highest level may be the goals for sub initiatives or business units at a lower level, which can then be expanded to provide Actors, Impacts and Deliverables within this sub-context.
See Also
References
- www.impactmapping.org accessed 2 May 2017