This is part of an ongoing series of posts about areas of READINESS that should be addressed to ensure project success, before you “start”.
Impact Analysis is a process used to determine who and what is affected by an upcoming change. Obviously, customers and/or employees, are likely impacted, each directly or indirectly. Affected could also be locations, materials, production velocity and even company culture.
Have you explored how a new project will impact your customers or your staff? Have you looked at both short-term and long-term impacts?
There are two distinct periods that should be explored: (1) during the project preparations, execution and implementation. Mostly impacted are those who have to do the work or support the work and (2) once the project outcome is “live” there may be impacts on customer experience, products or services offered, staff activities, organizational structure and staffing levels, your communications external and internal, and even your mission, vision, values and culture.
Without attention to Impact Analysis the ultimate costs of the project are unknown. You may have a budget for execution mapped out, but what about residual organizational impacts? What about ultimate costs to staff and/or customers who will likely be doing things differently. These could be both hard dollar costs as well as costs to brand, reputation, and marketing activities, and be distributed across areas of the company or community that were unexpected.
Sometimes it seems like it’s not the thing itself to worry most about, but everything else.
Make this an important area of exploration to help lay the foundation for a successful project outcome.
