What is the difference between Change Impacts Assessment and Mitigation?
Understanding the difference between Change Impacts Assessment (CIA) and Change Impacts Mitigation (CIM) can make or break how you manage Business Change in your transformation programme. Quite often, some programmes do not distinguish between the two definitively.
CIA refers to the analysis of the impacts arising from the transformation programme. It enables you to identify and understand impacts before they arise. Through analysis, its data is categoried, classified per impact type (for example People, Data, Process, Policy, Technology, Reporting, ESG etc) and risk-profiled (H/M/L).
CIM refers to the analysis of Change Impacts identified and the development of your mitigation plan by setting resolution actions and owners. Similar to Change Impacts, the plan is also categorised by Mitigation Action Type (for example Policy, Works Council, Training, Data etc). And importantly, mitigation action is taken and monitored.
Investing time, effort and resources to successfully complete CIA for your transformation programme is only half the job done. To transition to new ways of working with minimal disruption to the business, CIM must be performed in readiness for deployment. Change Impact Mitigation is often not performed well for reasons such as:
it is arduous and ongoing & requires dedicated resources to manage
it requires sponsorship buy-in and support
it is misunderstood and difficult to size and visualise
There isn’t a simple formulae to manage all your Change Impacts and its successful mitigation. It comes down to team discipline, sponsorship, and Change Leadership “know-how” in setting out the Change Impacts Management process suitably.
The associated image is one example of sizing, timelining and visualising CIM. This is one of many methods and processes but the key message is, let’s distinguish Change Impact Assessment vs Change Impacts Mitigation.
Author: Alex Yim
Category: Business Readiness