We appreciate that in the early stages of a project, you may still be discovering Impacts and trying to define them. In this instance, you may find that your high-level Impacts could be associated with multiple types. We have now adjusted the system to allow for such instances.
When you are initially discovering Impacts, you are now able to assign more than one Impact Type to each impact. There are pros and cons to doing this, and within this article, these will be covered so you have the most knowledge possible as you progress through your Impacts.
At the first point of capturing Impacts, it is important to capture as much information as possible regarding them. As you progress through your Project these Impacts are likely to grow and develop into more/other Impacts. Within the system, you are able to capture each Impact and assign as many types as you feel are applicable to each Impact. This does have implications, as it may skew your reporting around types.
For example, if you have 10 Impacts each with 3 different types, your total Impacts will be 10, but your total different types of Impacts will be 30, giving the impression there are more than there is.
We advise that as you progress through your Impact journey, you return to each multiple Impact Type and ask what the specific Impact is for each type.
To give you an example, you may have a high-level Impact titled:
Masterdata - this could have three types, Data, Technology & Process
The best practice here would be to come back to this Impact and ask yourself what makes it each type of Impact, for example:
Type - Data: This is a data Impact because the data storage is changing and we need to ensure we change the data storage with the least amount of business disruption possible
Type - Technology: This is a technology Impact because we need to ensure we have the new technology available to use for the data storage
Type - Process: This is a process Impact because we need to ensure that everyone who needs access to the master data is aware of how to find it, update it, and manage it.
In this example, each different type could actually be three different Impacts, each requiring different actions to ensure there is a minimal amount of business disruption as we progress through the change.
To ensure accurate reporting, having these three Impacts listed as separate Impacts would ensure you have oversight around how they are being managed and progressed to ensure that each one is being actioned appropriately and nothing is then able to slip through the net.
If we progressed with our Impact journey, keeping the one example Impact with the three types we initially captured as it is, it would be very easy to create one action that mitigates one area of the Impact but leaves the other two without actions. This, of course, would be problematic as that Impact hasn't been completely mitigated, but we would have no oversight as it would show on the reports as successfully actioned and mitigated.
This is why we advise that if you have Impacts that are listed with multiple types, you revisit them and ask why each type has been associated and whether this would be better suited to be broken out into separate Impacts for each type.