Achieving Goals With the SMART Concept and Impact Mapping
Key Takeaways
Defining clear goals and using impact mapping are essential for driving organizational success. Here’s why:
- SMART goals set the foundation: Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based to ensure clarity, alignment, and progress tracking
- Impact mapping connects goals to actions: This technique links goals to stakeholders, desired behaviour changes, and deliverables, creating a clear path to success
- Why impact mapping matters:
- Improves communication: Provides a shared understanding of goals across stakeholders, reducing biases and misalignment
- Increases accountability: When stakeholders co-create and agree on goals, their sense of responsibility grows, leading to better outcomes
- Enhances product roadmaps: Aligning roadmaps with impact mapping ensures a more strategic and effective delivery process
Have you ever seen an organization venture into the unknown without a defined goal? If there’s no clear goal, how do you even define what you’re doing? For me, it's a Sisyphean task. Well-prepared goals are crucial for developing an effective plan to achieve them.
From a business perspective, every valuable plan is based on goals that help improve an organization and accelerate its performance. So, if you want to develop your business, you must put effort into determining these aspects.
Based on the SMART concept and impact mapping, this article offers insights into achieving an organization's goals.
Describing Goals With the SMART Concept
Well-prepared goals should follow the SMART concept criteria:
- S-Specific: The goal should be clear and specific so that we know precisely what will be delivered
- M-Measurable: You should be able to track a goal's progress and see when you have accomplished it
- A-Achievable: The goal should be realistic and genuine, and it should be possible to achieve
- R-Relevant: The goal should be worthwhile and align with an organization’s needs
- T-Time-based: The goal should have a deadline or time frame
The following figure illustrates one of the goals of an e-commerce company.
Figure 1. Goal Description Based on the SMART Concept
Preparing a Delivery Plan With Impact Mapping
For this purpose, you can use impact mapping. It's a lightweight and easy-to-prepare technique created by Gojko Adzic to represent goals with a straightforward pattern that helps to grasp them. Moreover, the path to accomplishing them is well-defined.
Here are the essential components of impact mapping:
- Goal: This is the starting point in impact mapping. The goal must meet SMART criteria (which you already know). It answers the question, "Why are we doing this?"
- Actors: Recognize the key actors or stakeholders who can influence the achievement of the goal. These can include users, customers, business partners, or internal teams. It answers the question, "Who can influence goals?"
- Impacts: Determine the changes in behaviour needed by these actors to achieve the goal or activities that must be undertaken. These impacts are the desired outcomes that indicate progress toward the goal. It answers the question, "How will actors influence goals?"
- Deliverables: Identify the specific deliverables or actions that the team can produce to bring about the desired impacts. These are the tasks, features, or projects that will influence the actors’ behaviour in the intended way. It answers the question, "What factors help actors to complete goals?"
The following figure shows the impact mapping structure.
Figure 2. Impact Mapping Template
Engaging everyone involved in the delivery value process is crucial because it ensures the creation of strategic materials built on shared understanding and agreement. They’re on the same page.
The following figure illustrates what impact mapping might look like, based on the e-commerce company’s aforementioned goal.
Figure 3. Extract of Impact Mapping for an E-Commerce Company
The Meaning of Impact Mapping From the IT Provider Perspective
Impact mapping strongly resonates with the quality of the IT solutions delivery process. For the following three reasons, it’s an essential tool for business analysts, who are responsible for delivering business value to their customers.
1. It helps to accelerate communication with stakeholders
Stakeholders usually specialize in a specific domain or field within an organization, which can lead to biases or inconsistencies when addressing other critical areas—particularly in large companies. Impact mapping may serve as a strategic document, providing a holistic view and shared understanding of an organization’s goals, which all stakeholders should strive to accomplish.
Who likes working with stakeholders with limited knowledge about their domain and the organization’s goals and needs? I dare say, nobody.
2. Greater stakeholder awareness and responsibility when collaborating with providers
When goals are known in detail and aligned with actors who have agreed to them, the level of responsibility increases. Written words are more vital than oral ones, which are fleeting, especially when the actors involved have helped create this strategic document themselves.
The greater the level of responsibility, the better the outcomes of the activity.
3. Enhancing a product roadmap for delivering a solution
Impact mapping is a valuable source of knowledge for product roadmap planning and management. A product roadmap (and its parts: release scope, sprint scope, etc.) should be coherent with impact mapping.
Understanding what’s crucial for the organization enables you to plan a more effective product delivery process.
IIBA’s KnowledgeHub is your go-to resource for actionable "how-to" content, globally recognized standards (like the BABOK Guide), and practical tools for business analysis success. Start your FREE 7-day trial today.
About the Author
Milosz Anders is a business and system analyst and an IIBA member with the following certifications: ECBA, IIBA-CPOA, and IIBA-AAC. He also works as a UX/UI designer. Focused on delivering maximum outcomes with minimum outputs, Milosz specializes in geographic information systems and location intelligence.
