Solo Ep. 1 - How AI is Transforming Change Impact Assessments

A change impact assessment used to take me the best part of a day. Gathering the information, structuring it, theming the impacts, rating severity, writing it up so it's actually ready for a steering group.

In this solo episode, I walk through exactly how I now build a CIA using AI and my own READ Prompt Model (Role, End goal, Audience, Details) turning raw workshop notes into a themed, severity-rated impact table in under an hour.

I also cover the part that matters most: what AI can't do for you. Why the human check validating ratings with your project team, spotting gaps, stripping out anything speculative — is what makes an AI-assisted CIA reliable enough to put in front of a steering group.

If you're a change manager, transformation professional, or programme lead curious about using AI in your day-to-day deliverables, this one's for you.

🔗 Get the exact prompts I use, free: techbiztoolkit.com/claude-prompts

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to TechBiz Toolkit Podcast. I'm Rochelle. I'm a lead business change manager, and I help change and transformation professionals use AI to do their best work. This is a solo episode, so it's just me today, talking you through something that's been front of my mind this month. Today I want to talk about change impact assessments, otherwise known as CIAs, and how AI is genuinely changing the way we build them. You've worked in change for any length of time, you know the feeling. A CIA used to take me the best part of a day gathering information, structuring it, grouping impacts into themes, rating severity, writing it up so it's ready for a steering group, and it's always needed quickly, usually before you had time to do it properly. That's exactly the kind of deliverable AI is good for. Not because it replaces your judgment, it doesn't, but because it removes the blank page problem and gives you a structured starting point in minutes instead of hours. I use my own framework for this called the read model. Role, end goal, audience, details. Four things every time you prompt an AI tool, whether that's copilot, claude, or chat GPT. You tell it who it's acting as, that's the role. You tell it exactly what you need, that's the end goal. You tell it who the output is for, that's the audience, and you give it the constraints, formats, tone, length, that's the details. For a CIA, that looks like asking AI to act as a business change manager. Review your raw workshop notes, group the impacts into themes like people, process, technology, and data or policy, and rate each one for severity. Within about a minute, you've got a themed, structured table ready to refine. Now, this is the most important part I want to really stress, and what AI gives you is a first draft, not a final document. Before anything goes near stakeholder, you still need to validate severity ratings with your project team and your subject matter experts. AI doesn't know that your payroll team is under resourced or that three or four sites went through a different system change six months ago. That context is yours, not the models. You also need to check for gaps. Things you perhaps know from conversations that never made it into the workshop notes, for example. And you need to strip out anything speculative. If the AI has inferred an impact rather than drawing it from what you gave it, sense check it before it goes anywhere. AI gives you structure. Your professional judgment is what makes it reliable, makes it so reliable that it can be put in front of a steering group. The organizations doing this well right now aren't using AI to skip the thinking. They're using it to skip the formatting and blank page, the hours of manual structuring. So they've got more time for the part that actually needs a human judgment, context and stakeholder relationships. That's the shift I think every change professional needs to be paying attention to. It's not about AI doing change management for you. It's about AI clearing the admins so you can do more of the change management that actually matters. If you want the exact prompts I use for change impact assessments, along with prompts for cons, stakeholder mapping, training and more, they're all in the Claude Prompt Library. Free at TechbizToolkit.com forward slash Claude Prompts. Thanks for listening. If you found this useful, follow the podcast so you don't miss the next one, and I'll catch you next time.