Assessing Business Impact

Have you already found the right value proposition and initial business model in the previous phase of APIOps Cycles?

Traditionally, you do a risk analysis for a project or a system. Since we live in a distributed and connected world, every API counts. Big solutions use many APIs to serve customers.

What is the impact on the business if a payment processing API used by a webshop is not working for a day? What are the workarounds to process them? Should we add support staff or shut down the webshop? How much would either of those options cost? What if 100 webshops rely on our API and we lose them to the competitor? These questions are hard to answer without business knowledge. That is why business and technical experts should collaborate in using the Assess business impact canvas.

Now you are ready to do a quick risk analysis on your API. The purpose is to understand the impact on the business of the risks. You can use the results to find more detailed information on costs and activities. Update the API business model canvas with this information.

Interview key stakeholders or fill the canvas with them:

• customer service, account manager, partner manager
• business (process) owners
• project manager
• service manager to understand the real impact and possibilities to mitigate.

The goal here is to find the impact, not necessarily the exact solution for mitigation.

Write down any clear and existing workarounds. These are for example having default values, using manual process or just living with the situation temporarily.

The actual mitigation plan can be made just before starting the building phase. Purpose of this template is to remind the team to design, implement and test these requirements.

Update the API business bodel canvas with activities and/or costs based on the impact analysis.