Impact Effort Matrix template
Ayoa’s Impact Effort Matrix template will enable you to identify quick wins and any actions that will generate minimal impact for your business, so you can better prioritize your tasks and plan what your team should be focusing on next.
What is an Impact Effort Matrix?
As a manager, you want to ensure that your team is working on the right things, at the right time. In order to succeed, it’s vital that everything you do as a team is going to bring benefits to your business and will take you a step closer to achieving your collective goals. The Impact Effort Matrix is an effective planning and decision-making tool that puts your tasks into a highly visual format and helps you easily prioritize them based on how long they will take to complete and the potential impact they will have on your organization.
An Impact Effort Matrix is split into four quadrants to help you prioritize your outstanding tasks and determine whether there are any that can be eliminated (or simply completed at a later date when the time to do so becomes available). These four quadrants are:
- Low-effort and low-impact
- High-effort and low-impact
- Low-effort and high-impact
- High-effort and high-impact
Why use the Impact Effort Matrix template?
Prioritizing your or your team’s workload can be difficult – especially if you have various tasks to work through and very little time to actually do them. By using the Impact Effort Matrix template to organize your workload, you can put everything you need to do into a visual, easily-digestible format, so you can see at a glance what is outstanding.
By organizing your team’s tasks into specific quadrants based on their value and the time they will take to complete, you can work through backlogs more effectively by prioritizing any tasks that can be done quickly and will generate instant results; these are your ‘quick wins’. Using an Impact Effort Matrix can also help you to reduce time and energy being wasted by your team on actions that will bring little return for your business. For example, if too many of your tasks are low-impact and high-effort, you may decide that you need to eliminate them altogether.
How to use our Impact Effort Matrix template
Ayoa’s Impact Effort Matrix template is already populated with examples to help you create your own effective action plan. Discover how to use this template below.
To access the template, sign up to Ayoa. Once you've signed up, navigate to the homepage to create a new whiteboard, mind map or task board and choose this template from the library.
Our overarching aims and help you to prioritize them more effectively. During this stage, it may be helpful to create a mind map in Ayoa to add your ideas to, then use as a source of reference.
Our template already has the sections you need to start organizing your workload. List of all your outstanding tasks, then add these to the template using sticky notes. Feel free to add these to any section of the template – these can be organized next.
Now that you know exactly what tasks are on your team’s to-do list, it’s time to start organizing them into the following sections:
- Low-effort and low-impact: these are tasks that are quick and easy to complete, but potentially won’t have much impact on your business.
- High-effort and low-impact: these are your ‘time-wasters’ – tasks that take more time and effort to complete, but aren’t likely to generate substantial results.
- Low-effort and high-impact: these are your ‘quick wins’ – tasks that require less effort to complete but will generate quick results.
- High-impact and high-effort: these are tasks that may take more time and resources to complete, but are likely to bring long-term value (such as major projects).
Remember to keep your goals and objectives firmly in mind when determining whether a task has the potential to be high-impact.
The tasks that you identified as low-effort and high-impact can be prioritized to be completed first, though you may also want to start planning to focus on your high-effort and high-impact tasks in the near future. Low-impact and low-effort tasks should be next on your list. However, for the tasks that you identified as high-effort and low-impact, you may want to consider if you can eliminate these tasks and replace them with others that have the potential to bring more value.
Now that you know what actions you should be prioritizing, it’s time to put them into action. Create a task board in Ayoa, add these as tasks, assign them to members of your team, and set start dates, due dates, and reminders to keep everyone on track.
