The Importance of Change Impact Assessments

Regardless of the type of change being deployed in an organisation, the change impact assessment (CIA) is a critical activity that will contribute towards making change stick.

Impacted stakeholders want to understand “What’s in it for me?”, and the change impact assessment uncovers this information and supports the planning of change interventions that will increase the probability of project success.

Read on to find out:

Your change impact assessment will analyse the type and level of change expected to impact groups of employees. It is used to understand how people will be impacted and will therefore inform and shape your change strategy.

Carrying out a change impact assessment will enable you to spend time on the right activities for informing, engaging and equipping people to adapt when they need to.

Identifying and communicating what’s changing at the right time prepares people and allows them the opportunity to process what the change will look like for them. This can lead to:

A change impact assessment should be carried out during the early planning stages of your business change, before any delivery or rollout has started. If you don’t understand how your change will impact various stakeholder groups, it will be impossible to create targeted and effective interventions to bring them on the change journey, which will significantly harm your progress and results.

Your change will impact in different ways depending on the scale and scope of your project and your organisation. However, change impacts can be broadly grouped into these categories:

Systems and Tools

Changes that require new technologies, updates to existing tools or shifts in how systems are accessed or integrated.

Processes

Modifications to workflows, procedures, or how tasks are executed across teams or functions.

Org Design

Impacts to team structures, reporting lines, or departmental roles that may require reorganization.

Skill Impact

Gaps in capabilities or the need for new training to meet revised expectations or operate new systems.

Culture/Behaviours

Shifts in mindset, values, or daily work habits that may challenge existing norms or team dynamics.

Responsibilities

Changes in who does what — roles may expand, contract, or transfer, often requiring negotiation and clarification.

Your change initiative might cause one or a combination of these impacts, but you won’t fully uncover this until you engage stakeholders directly with a change impact assessment.

To properly assess the full scope of a change, different types of change impact analysis can be used, each focusing on a specific dimension of the organisation. Whether the change is structural, technological, or behavioural, applying the right lens helps ensure no critical impact is overlooked.

Business Change Impact Analysis

Helps you identify the specific groups, departments, functions, teams, and job roles that will be affected by the change.

System or Software Change Impact Analysis

Enables you to pinpoint which business processes and legacy technology tools will be impacted, or potentially replaced, by a technology-driven change.

Cultural, Mindset or Operational Change Impact Analysis

Allows you to identify the individuals and groups whose behaviours, attitudes or ways of working will be affected, so they can be supported through the transition.

Your change impact analysis needs to measure potential change impact across a range of categories, including people, process, technology, culture and competency. Therefore, it should be quantifiable so it can be measured, compared and benchmarked. Use scales of 1-5, 6 or 10 to assess the level of change, with standard descriptions for each number so anyone participating or reading the results can understand the scores. As specialists in the people agenda of change, we use scales of 1-25 to enable us to get the granularity needed to truly focus on people, roles and functions.

Firstly, always speak to the people who are going to be affected to get a true understanding of change impact; don’t just rely on project team members or sponsors for your data. You need the ground-level insights, not just the enterprise helicopter view, as this is where the impacts will be felt the most.

Though you should use numbers to standardise your scores, numbers alone generally aren’t enough; the detail behind your scoring is really essential, so get as much insight as you can.

The method you use to gather data will influence this. You can use a survey if necessary, but ideally you should have a detailed discussion with impacted colleagues. Or, even better, do it in a workshop with people moving around the room and contributing to various activities and questions at the same time.

Once you’ve interpreted the data, you can bring it to life for your people with visual tables, graphs, etc.

Use techniques like impact analysis to assess the severity and reach of each change, dependency mapping to understand how impacts are linked across systems, roles, or processes, and gap analysis to highlight the difference between the current and future state — especially where new skills, behaviours, or tools are required.

Look for patterns in responses and see if you can tell an engaging story from these.

But also, crucially, pick out concerns or challenges identified and use your project team and subject matter experts to directly assess them and devise ways to address them as a team.

The change tactics you develop should be designed to help mitigate and manage the impact you’ve identified.

Templates can be useful, but because every change is different, your approach to measuring change impact should be tailored to what you’re really trying to understand and measure.

For this reason, Afiniti doesn’t recommend or rely on a change impact assessment template. If you need any help designing an assessment that’s bespoke to your change, let us know.

The following steps outline how to carry out a Change Impact Assessment in a structured and practical way. Starting with scoping and stakeholder identification, and progressing through data collection, impact analysis and intervention planning, this approach ensures you gather the right insights and translate them into clear, targeted actions.

1. Decide the Scope and Identify Key Stakeholders

Start by defining the boundaries of the change and identifying who needs to be involved.

Activities:

Output:

2. Gather Current State Information and Map to the Future State

Understand how things work today and what’s changing.

Activities:

Output:

This stage marks the transition from high-level impact assessment to detailed impact analysis.

3. Conduct Feedback Collection via Stakeholder Engagement

Engage the people closest to the work to validate assumptions and uncover real-world impacts.

Methods:

Output:

4. Analyse the Impacts and Prioritise

Classify and rate the change impacts to inform planning.

Activities:

Output:

5. Define and Assign Change Interventions

Tailor your change management response based on the level and type of impact.

Activities:
For each identified impact, plan and assign appropriate interventions such as:

Output:

By following these steps, you move from understanding the broad scope of change to identifying specific impacts and assigning the right responses. This process enables you to plan change interventions based on real data, helping affected teams navigate the transition with clarity, support and minimal disruption.

A global energy company investing in a connected SAP ERP solution to harmonise their global ways of working engaged Afiniti as the business change partner to support the UK Business Unit.

High-Level Change Impact Analysis

Initially we supported the client to identify and assess impacts across the dimensions of process, people, organisation, systems and data at a high-level.

The high-level change impact assessment represented the average magnitude of change across functional business areas. This was a great tool to support initial communication and engagement with impacted stakeholders and allowed for the change management team to be correctly resourced for the next stage of the project.

There was still much work to be done to uncover what change would look like for specific teams and roles, but the high-level change impact assessment provided the baseline to progress to more detailed change impact assessments.

Detailed Change Impact Analysis

Working in partnership with the client team to uncover the change impacts at the individual role level, we:

The detailed change impact analysis was captured and baselined in a change workbook, which was the single source of truth for all change management related data and was regularly updated throughout the life of the project.

1. The foundation of the change interventions

The change impact assessments formed the basis of what we needed to communicate, inform and educate people on to support the successful transition from the current to future ways of working. The change impact analysis supported the delivery of a number of interventions, including:

The impact assessments determined the roles that were built into personas, providing input to change impact workshops to bring the changes to life for highly impacted roles before attending training. The data captured in the assessments also provided important input into future targeted messages.

2. Identifying people-related risks

By understanding the change impacts, we were able to identify and reach out to teams and roles facing radical and major change to see how they currently felt about the transition.

We ensured these managers and teams were added to the stakeholder engagement plan so that we could continue to support these individuals in their change journey. We continued to monitor highly impacted teams to identify change resistance and change fatigue.

3. Identifying gaps in the current project deliverables

An inadvertent benefit of the impact assessments for this client was identifying gaps in solution and process design; we uncovered over twenty changes that could not yet be assessed due to:

The project team subsequently progressed these to completion in readiness for finalising the baselined impacts.

4. Focusing the client on thinking about change from the individual perspective

Ultimately, the impact assessments enabled the client team to begin to really think about benefits and challenges at both the functional and the individual level.

The focus moved from emphasising the benefits the project would bring for the organisation to looking at it from a people perspective.

As a result, we had an engaged client team who understood the importance of putting people at the front of centre of everything they do.

Learn more about how we can help your organisation with its SAP S/4HANA business change challenges and opportunities, or alternatively get in touch for support with the change impact assessment for your next project.