Impact Mapping - a cheatsheet

This handbook is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software.

Impact mapping helps to reduce waste by preventing scope creep and over-engineered solutions. It provides focus for delivery by putting deliverables in the context of impacts they are supposed to achieve. It enhances collaboration by creating a shared big-picture view for technical and business people.

impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software.

An impact map communicates scope, goals and priorities, but also assumptions on two levels. The first is that a deliverable will cause a change in behaviour of an actor, produce an impact. The second is that once the impact is achieved, the relevant actor will contribute to the overall objectives. This visualisation makes impact maps a powerful too

An impact map puts all the deliverables in the context of the impacts that they are supposed to support.

Impact mapping is a great way to engage senior business and technical experts at the start of work on a product module or project milestone to create a shared understanding of scope – not from a technical but from a business perspective.

An impact map is also a storyboard of our conceptual understanding of how to address a goal or target.