Change Impact
What you must understand
Change impact looks at what will change, who and what is affected, and how severely. Assess across people, processes, technology, organisation and customers. Compare current and future state to identify gaps in roles, skills, behaviours, workloads, structures and performance. Distinguish hard impacts (systems, processes, structures) from soft impacts (confidence, status, relationships). Consider severity, scale and cumulative impact: two moderate changes can saturate the same team. Use process mapping, role impact analysis, stakeholder impact workshops and validation with affected groups. Impact assessment is iterative and should inform plans, training, communication and readiness.
Traps
Impact is often assessed once at the start and not revisited. Teams focus on system changes and underplay role and skill impacts. Cumulative change saturation is missed. Impact is not the same as risk: impact is what changes; risk is what might go wrong. Do not assume impacts are uniform across sites or teams. Avoid unvalidated assumptions from the project team.
Worked example
A new CRM affects sales processes (pipeline stages), roles (administrative work shifts to sales), skills (data quality and reporting), and customers (response times). Combine severity and number affected to prioritise. If another system change lands in the same quarter, treat the combined load as a separate impact.