Understanding the impact of a specific change – enhancement or new feature to the enterprise implementation.

Sometimes, a change in one module within a system may impact more than the system in which the module resides. In a highly integrated Business Process environment, impact analysis becomes critical. This activity will require both Business Analysts and Systems Analysts along with the members of the Project Management team in order to determine not only the Resourcing and Materials for the changes to the Applications and Modules in question, but also to the Resources and Materials required to manage the impact of this change and its downstream / upstream effect in the Enterprise Application Framework. For example, the impact of modifying a field in the database will not only affect the application that is built atop the database, but also other integrating applications, reports, ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) Processes and business intelligence / processing that is built around that field.