Impact Assessment: Getting Back to Basics

This session is led by Jakub Větrovec, who started the Change Management Institute chapter in the Czech Republic and Slovakia around two and a half years ago and has co-led it ever since. Jakub has worked in Change Management for the past 15 years in different roles and countries, starting in India, moving to the UK and then landing back in the Czech Republic. He has recently left corporate life to start his own company with a partner.

Jakub takes us back to the basics of change impact assessment: what it is, why it matters, who it should cover, what a lean assessment looks like and how to turn the results into action. He sees it as probably the most important tool or technique Change Managers have to make a good start, and one that lives throughout the whole project afterwards.

What change impact assessment is

Change impact assessment is the core of the intelligence we have about what actually changes in a project, initiative or programme, whatever level we are looking at. It looks at:

• Different aspects of the organisation: processes, systems, skills and organisational structure
• Who the change is for: who is changing their ways of working, their daily jobs or their locations
• Different teams, manager layers and leadership, slicing the organisation in different ways
• How much change there is, whether that is the capacity people will need to dedicate or the resources required to deliver the change and support the organisation at the right level

It brings transparency and visibility into how complex the change actually is, and it can be shared in multiple ways.

Why it matters

• A visual picture of the change
  It showcases the complexity, severity or significance of the change to management, the organisation and different stakeholders, and works as a tool to engage and align the project team itself
• A way to compare projects
  With one tool across the organisation, you can compare multiple projects at a high level, see priorities and the capacities behind them, and build broader awareness than a single project allows
• A view of impact on teams and their capacity
  How much lands on each team and when
• Where and what to focus on
  Prioritise groups and areas, and size the support
• The base for the change plan
  Most of the planning spans from it. Training needs, communication needs and how to engage stakeholders start to become clear once the assessment is done
• A live document
  Start at a very high level, then reassess when the project changes or priorities shift, and show how that changes the approach and the impact on the teams involved

One of the first questions to ask when you join a project is simple: what are the changes, and how do we see them?

At which level should you assess?

Three levels, the same tool

There are three perspectives on where to focus the assessment and what level of granularity to start with.

Level 1:  The whole project
Done at the beginning as a tool to engage the steering committee, the project team, the sponsor and management. It is not about particular teams or departments, but about how significant the change is for the organisation overall

Level 2:  A module, process or deliverable
Once there are more details and the target picture is clear, assess how each module, process or deliverable changes current ways of working across different teams. This builds understanding of how to get the organisation ready, the risks to running processes and operations, and stakeholders you may not have been aware of

Level 3:  A team or stakeholder group
The ultimate goal is to understand the impact on the team, on managers within the team and on other stakeholder groups, and how to address those impacts, whether through communication, training, engagement or resistance planning

The timing and the use differ, but it is still pretty much the same tool.

Who really feels the change

Impact assessment often shows that more people are involved or impacted than originally thought, or than the project team sees on its stakeholder map. The Change Manager discovers many more parties. A useful way of looking at who is impacted comes from Melanie Franklin’s Agile Change Agent training.

• Those doing the work. Most of us look at who operates the process, and the project team and experts work quite closely with these people. As a Change Manager, expand the view
• Suppliers to the process. Inputs may need to look different or arrive at different frequencies. If a location changes, logistic routes may change too
• Customers, internal or external. They may receive a different format of output, at different frequencies, in different shapes, or a different service altogether
• Those checking or authorising the work. The management layer may need to start asking different questions, requiring different reports and focusing on the behaviours people are actually living. Understanding how they should manage, check and validate the work is equally important

Throughout the impact assessment, this becomes a revalidation of the stakeholder map before the actual assessment work begins.

What does an assessment actually look like?

A lean template: six criteria and four levels

Everyone has a tool. In the end it comes down to how much time you have, how deep you go into the assessment and how much granularity you can collect. With AI, building massive tools is no longer a problem, but what matters is that the document is lived, read and used.

Over the years and across different approaches, Jakub has come down to six criteria. Prosci would give you around 12, and others use five. The six criteria are: 

• Behaviour and culture
  
• Process, procedures and policy
  
• Systems and technology
  
• Skills and knowledge
  
• Roles and organisational structure
  
• Customer experience

Each criterion has four levels of impact, with an explanation behind each one of what low, medium and high actually mean. The same approach works for the project and for the team.

How the template works 

• It is a simple Excel workbook, and with AI and vibe coding everyone can go a bit further, but the basics are always the same
• Scores come from selecting the description that fits, through observation or discussion with stakeholders
• Short bullet points sit behind each score to explain the actual change, so anyone reading it can see what is meant
• A simple visual shows how big the change is, ready to share with management or in reports

You will find a copy of this example template at the end of this article. 

This visual is useful and powerful when the change looks like changing a system or moving the office, but the impact and what needs to be considered is much greater. It shows stakeholders why they need a change team and change activities when their initial view of the change is oversimplified, and in a report it opens conversations at the board.

One page per process or module

At the process or module level, the approach is simpler. Compare the current state with the future state, check who is impacted, and straight away identify the communication need and the training need. These are not separate exercises. While in conversation with stakeholders or observing the work, you are already noting what to consider for communication and training.

The inspiration here comes from IdeaLeap and its lean change agent training: simple visual materials in place of heavy documentation, without spending ages listing thousands of lines in Excel. One page per deliverable, process or module, comparing as-is with to-be, is the most detail required. 

People cannot picture a future they have not seen

Predefined definitions of low, medium and high bring a challenge: not everyone can imagine what sits behind the scores. Prepare questions, then test and validate them from different angles so people can start imagining how the future looks different, what they will need to do differently and how they will need to think differently. 

Stakeholders really start thinking about the change when they see it, witness it or start living it. If the work is not done right, much of the realisation only comes when implementation hits the ground, and people say they forgot to mention that in this situation they actually do something different. In big corporations or fragmented organisations, everyone does things slightly differently, and those topics surface too late.

Make the future visible

• Process maps work with quite a few people, but not everyone can imagine anything behind a process map
• Mockups and demo systems, now possible with AI and vibe coding, can look almost real, so people start noticing what is missing in the system or in the scenarios of their day-to-day life
• Shadowing the work shows how it really happens. Not everything is documented, or it is very high level, and the reality for the people doing the job is often quite different

Score it together

At the project level, whether you have six, seven or ten categories, run the assessment as a group, starting with the project team. The scale can be 0 to 3 or 1 to 5, it does not matter. Ask everyone in the room to score each category for themselves, then look at the differences and let the conversation happen. Why did one person score 0 and another score 5? Often it is because they have different views of what the change actually is.

This is powerful when stakeholders realise they have not seen all the implications of what they are building or bringing to the organisation. It can take five minutes to do the assessment and half an hour to discuss it, and even with the project team it makes quite a difference to how they perceive the change and its actual implications.

What do you do with the results?

From impact to action

Once you know the impacts, it is your best guess, and you will likely refine it throughout the project. It becomes the ground for:

• Communication needs
  what each group needs to hear, from whom and when
• Training needs
  which skills and knowledge are new: high impact means structured training, low impact means lighter touchpoints
• Personas
  groups with a shared set of changes become personas you can design for
• Stakeholder assessment
  who is impacted, how, how much, and how much influence they have on the project
• Readiness and risk
  where impact is high, readiness is the risk to watch
• Planning change across multiple projects
  see how much lands on the same people at the same time

Taking change to the senior management table

Across multiple projects, and for organisations starting to talk about a change portfolio, a comparable assessment lets you show a heat map of changes across a department or the whole organisation. For example, 15 changes ahead of us, all of them changing processes and half of them changing job roles or technology. This is a good aid to bring Change Management into senior management discussions.

Going deeper

For more on how others approach it, two earlier sessions in the member resource hub go a little deeper from different perspectives. Exploring Change Impact goes step by step, while Assessing Change Impact looks at how Change Managers should approach it through the Change Management Body of Knowledge.