Now it’s time to beginning creating your impact assessment. Impact assessments are works in progress, with the initial assessment helping guide future exploration and work. As the change progresses however, new information might be uncovered, or decisions might be made that impact the original assessment. While you can create your impact assessment in many different ways, using a spreadsheet or database tool is a common practice and can make keeping your information organized and reporting easier.
To complete this activity you will create your impact assessment template, and a plan for conducting your initial assessment:
- Create a spreadsheet or database template to collect impact information. Many templates are freely available and have differing levels of complexities (mainly depending on the users comfort with tools like Excel).This tool from the Government of South Australia can help you think through what fields you’ll need. Find one you like and customize it:
- Identify what information you already have available, which you are missing, and who can help you with gathering both sets. Examples of considerations:
- Do you already have a list of all processes that are changing?
- Does your organization have a list of all the different groups and positions that exist?
- Are there documents describing the way current processes happen?
- Create a plan to gather both existing and missing information. Things to consider:
- Data analysis exercises (e.g. looking at the organization’s employee list to identify groups and roles)
- Data gathering exercising (e.g. hosting a meeting to map out relevant processes, or discuss current and to-be states of relevant processes with end-users)
- Clear responsibility of who will collect and analyze what information (e.g. will you send the template to subject matter experts and have them fill it out, or will you fill it out?)