At Amazon, we work in a fast-paced environment with a high rate of change. How do you perform an impact assessment to the strategic plans you are responsible for when significant changes arise?

Remember to include the aspects of your impact assessment process that rely on intuition and experience in addition to data-driven processes. The experience and feelings of a program manager can be an important factor when developing a strategy from the results of an impact analysis effort.

"The first thing I would do is brainstorm a list of impact areas to be assessed. For example, I might consider financial impact, customer satisfaction, resource time, the frequency in which something occurs, the number of affected clients or users, etc. I would assign a weight to each of these impact areas depending on the relative importance of the area to the client and business unit I am working with.

Next, I would develop an easy-to-use scale to rate each assessment item in terms of impact. A typical scale would be a high-low scale in which I use the numbers 1-10. I would rate the items myself using a data-driven approach, or facilitate a stakeholder session to rate the items. Using a simple formula, I would then calculate the overall impact of each item.

I would consider adjustments to the scores based on my previous experience and intuition as well as the experience and feelings of the other subject matter experts involved. I would then develop a recommendation with strategic and tactical guidance supported by the impact analysis."

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