Abstract: Impact map is a good planning tool. It establishes a relationship between business objectives and product functions in a visual and structured form to ensure that product functions are useful to customers, profitable and valuable for the company.

This article is from the Planning Tool you Must Know — Impact Map in Huawei Cloud community.

The importance of goals

The opposite story

There is a saying: “the horse strong car is better than the direction.” It comes from an old story in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. There was a man who wanted to go to the state of Chu. He took a lot of money with him, hired a good chariot, a steed, and a skilled driver, but the direction was wrong. Ignoring the dissuadments of passers-by, he thought he had no problem because he had a strong horse and a good chariot, so he walked northward. As a result, he was farther and farther away from chu. This is the opposite story.

Picture 1 The opposite story

The Golden Circle

This story reminds me of the Golden circle rule. In 2009, Simon Sinek proposed The GoldenCircle rule in his TED talk “How Great leadership spire Action”. The golden circle rule is like three concentric circles: WHY ->HOW -> WHAT. The order of thinking is from the inside out. In the story, the man who wanted to go to The State of Chu did not follow his goal. He emphasized HOW to have a tightly packed and strong chariot, a beautiful horse and a skilled driver, which would help him to achieve his goal.

Figure 2. Golden circle rule

In his speech, Simon Sinek compared the way that general companies and Apple like to communicate with consumers, illustrating that when people decide to buy, they are not buying products, but paying for their beliefs and purposes. Why is more important than what you do and how you do it.

Table 1 Comparison of sales communication between general companies and Apple

The importance of planning in software development

The same is true in software development. According to the survey data, only 20% of the software delivered is used frequently, and 80% is used occasionally, rarely, and never.

Table 2 Functional utilization statistics of delivered software

Therefore, in the product planning stage, it is very important to know what the real needs of customers or users are, so that the final product features can be really used and truly valuable. An impact map is a great planning tool that connects business goals and product functions in a visual and structured way to ensure that product functions are useful to customers, profitable, and valuable to the company.

Planning Tool – Impact Mapping

What is an impact map

Impact map was proposed by The Agile master Gojko Adzi in his book Impact Mappping in 2012. The form is shown in the figure below. It is shown in a structured form through the analysis of Why->Who->How -> What at four levels. Establish a relationship between business objectives (Why) and product functions (What), so that the team can clearly see how each function affects the realization of business objectives, and ensure that each product function done by the team is of value.

Figure 3 Impact map

The four levels represent:

  • Why: Objective, this is the core layer, to figure out Why the product is being developed, what are the customer needs?

  • Who: Roles, Who wants to achieve this goal, which roles will affect the achievement of the goal? Do you promote it or hinder it? Who will be affected by it?

  • How: Influence. How do these roles affect the goals? Help or hinder?

  • -Serena: What? What can we do to support the realization of these impacts? It can be product functionality, event operations, content delivery, etc. In actual work, we often get stuck in the “What” level, thinking about What to do to achieve the goal, while ignoring the middle two levels, and even forgetting the “Why” level.

The impact map creates two assumptions between the “Why” (business goal) and the “What” (product function) to present our thinking logic.

  • One is the impact hypothesis, in which different roles have different effects to help achieve the goal.

  • One is the functional assumption, where providing the corresponding product functionality or service can have such an impact.

Affect the use of maps

Figure 4 shows an example of an impact map

Set a goal

First, the setting of goals can be based on SMART principles: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and time-bound. Within 6 months, doubling the number of community developers satisfies the SMART principle.

Divergent thinking

After having the goal, the structure after the hierarchical decomposition is similar to the form of mind mapping. Here, we can refer to the hierarchical rule of mapping: MECE: independent of each other and without each other’s omission. In short, it means no overlap and no omission.

  • No overlap: For example, in the second layer of role thinking, if divided into social people, college students, community developers, there will be overlap, community developers include college students and social people; Similarly, there can be no such categories as universities, training institutions, publishing houses and partners, because the first three belong to the category of partners.

  • Nothing left out: This is not mandatory on the impact map, but can be used flexibly according to the current objective, usually as long as the key characters and key ideas are already on the map. If you want more ideas and ideas, you can brainstorm to spread more content.

Conclusion the convergence

Finally, it is the process of convergence, and we need to find one or several fastest and shortest paths on the impact map, rather than all paths. The “What” in the fourth layer is the specific action level. There may be many actions on the critical path. At this time, it is necessary to prioritize and analyze with the help of the tool of return on investment matrix.

Figure 5 return on investment matrix

In this way, the framework of the influence map leads us to conduct requirements planning, and the guiding layer of the goals down to the functions to avoid deviation. Let the team hard to make the product is really valuable, bring profits for the company, get a sense of achievement.

Impact maps can be used for anything that requires goal guidance, not just software development. No matter in study, work or life, whether it is a big goal or a small goal, the impact map can clearly show the value of everything we do to the realization of our goals.

Write in the last

Everyone knows the importance of goals, but often walk, walk, forget the original intention, forget the way. The impact map is not a silver bullet. It can’t be planned once and for all. It needs to be reviewed and adjusted regularly in order to be on the right track. We all have to think about the “big things” as we do the little things, so that all the little things move in the right direction.

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