Weeknotes#4 — Impact mapping
I was out and about this week, in Leeds on Tuesday and Wednesday then Preston on Friday.
I went to Preston with the team who are working on the digital transformation of Carer’s Allowance. It is a benefit paid to people who are caring for a disabled person (and that person is on a disability benefit) for at least 35 hours per week, and who are on a low income.
You can apply and report changes online already. The project has moved recently from one team to another — and one place to another — so it’s a good opportunity to “reset” and take stock of the goals.
The digital team have been working with stakeholders to set the new goals. The workshop on Friday was to look in more detail at how we might do things differently to get us to our goals.
Natalie, the Product Manager, used a technique called Impact Mapping, then we played a game to work out our priorities. More about the game later!
Impact Mapping takes us from our high-level Goal, through the Actors — the people who are involved in the goal, the Impact of what we think should change, to a Deliverable – what can we do to make that change.
These are not one-to-one relationships, so we end up with MANY Deliverables linked to each goal.

Our stakeholder group was pretty diverse: we had reps from Operations, Audit, Communications, Technology, Policy, Quality and more.
The group split themselves into 4 teams: one per goal. We had 30 minutes to start working through Actors, Impact and Deliverables. It was hard at first, getting used to what the technique needed from us, and also hard to challenge what we’ve been doing for years to think about what we could do differently.
After that we moved around to the next goal, spending 30 minutes adding to what the previous team had already done. By that time, our brown paper was filling up with sticky notes — colour co-ordinated, of course.
After a break we moved on again, this time for just 15 minutes, then the same for the final goal.
It would have been easy to stop there, say “thanks for that” and go and type out all of the sticky notes. But the point of the day wasn’t just to crowd-source ideas, it was to get a prioritised list of things to start working on.
Dot vote
In case you’ve not done a dot vote before, it’s a simple way to visualise a group’s priorities. We all got 12 dots: 3 per goal. We could choose to vote for 3 deliverables we thought were important, or, if you thought just one of them was essential, you could use all 3 dots on one thing.
During lunch, the facilitators got all the deliverables that were voted for, and Affinity Sorted them (grouped).
There was a surprisingly large overlap across the goals. For example, simplifying the way that the operational teams make decisions about claims would be beneficial to 3 of the goals.
We ended up with 14 unique deliverables. We did some rough T shirt sizing of those deliverables into costs of £5, £10 and £50.
Games!
Natalie had been getting creative and gave us each £15 monopoly money to spend. We joined our 4 groups into 2 larger groups and were asked to spend our money.
Talking through the relative merits of each deliverable, with the associated cost, we decided on our top priorities and paid over our money.
The discussions that brought us to our conclusions were really interesting: we were thinking about cheaper, short-term wins that would get us part of the way to the goal, without having to spend £50. Or should we go all-out and head straight for the strategic option?
There was some overlap between what the two groups put into their first spending round, but not total overlap.

In the next round we were given £10 each then asked to choose again.
And in round 3 we got £5 each. At this point, the teams looked at both of our lists together, and realised that there were a few items that none of us had chosen in the previous rounds. So we pooled our money and bought those things.
Now the digital team has a list of prioritised, roughly sized, deliverables that they can look at in more detail and split down into tasks.
But not only that.
The list was created with and by our stakeholders. When they see the list of stuff we want to work on, they can think “I wrote that one. I helped create that list”. Having a digital team rock up and change things, things you’ve been working on for years, can be really hard for people. If things are done TO you, not WITH you, there’s a risk of resentment, and a risk of them being the wrong things.
This is the real value of the day. That we have a list of prioritised deliverables that we all know are the right things to be doing.
