By: Steve Zimmerman
When it comes to assessing mission impact for the Matrix Map, you’re going to conduct a survey or have a discussion where you assess the performance of each business line on a set of criteria. We recommend that you choose four criteria that are meaningful to you, but there isn’t any magic or science behind that number. Here’s how we came up with it:
Let’s say that your organization has seven business lines: three main programs and four ways of generating unrestricted support. As part of this step, we’re having a discussion where we assess the performance of each business line both on an overall basis as well as relative to each other. You’re not only asking “Does this program have impact?” but also, “Does this program have more impact than this program?” Doing this for many business lines can be tiring.
So, back to the number of criteria. If you have seven business lines and four criteria, that is a total of 28 questions that you’re answering. If you have seven criteria it would 49 questions. The numbers go up and – this is the important part – it isn’t any more objective. It is still your internal assessment of how a business line is performing.
Therefore, we chose a number of four criteria to give you a starting point for discussion. We’ve had clients use seven or eight criteria with no problem as well. The correct number and what those criteria are should be up to you.