Impact Analysis — project management SharePoint template

Scope planning process: progressively iterative and critical to set and manage expectation.

To understand a project you need to understand project impact and an impact assessment is a project tool to outline the scope of project impact. Projects impact people and project success relies on people impact for adoption.

Projects can have success without project tools and templates, but project tools provide a sanity check for random, emotional, and irrational acts people are capable of.

Are tools a prescription for success? No, never. But certainly tools can provide reason against the emotional and reactive behaviors we people are capable of.

The past year I modified the suite of project templates from Microsoft Excel for use in Microsoft SharePoint, an integrated collaboration and publishing tool.

Sharing is the New Selfish

SharePoint is a great collaboration tool to improve project management experience. I now offer the old set of Excel scope templates to anyone using SharePoint, as well as new opportunity register and change management tools within SharePoint.

SharePoint’s centralization and transparency replaces scraps of emails and files strewn akimbo across folders, drives, networks, and versions. SharePoint provides project teams ways to:

• Share assessments and templates,
• Schedule feedback,
• Foster collaboration,
• Collect data,
• View data:
  • Gantt charts,
  • KPI (Key Performance Indicators),
  • Dashboards,
• Analyze data,
• Filter data,
• Update data,
• Provide transparency, and
• Create self service model

Projects Impact People

Projects have impact. Impact affects risk. Risk affects hope. Hope affects scope. An impact analysis is an early-phase assessment to identify all stakeholders, their needs, their awareness, and their insight into the project before they surprise you.

There are two reasons to start a project:

1. Create something new
2. Improve something that exists

Either two of those reasons, therefore, impact current-state, but too often, projects kick-off before a true understanding on the impact to people, process, and technology. The SharePoint Impact Analysis template looks like this and stores in a SharePoint list. To download the template, jump below.

Impact Analysis Template for SharePoint

Download the SharePoint Impact Analysis Template to your hard drive.

To learn how to upload to your SharePoint site see appendix in below deck. Once uploaded you can customize as necessary.