What are ChangePilot Admin Impact and User Impact ratings?
With up to 2,000 Microsoft 365 changes announced via Message Center annually, the ChangePilot team assigns an admin impact and a user impact rating to each Message Centre item. These dual ratings help you quickly identify the ~30% that require active management from the 70% that are informational.
ChangePilot's impact ratings complement Microsoft's Message Center categories (Prevent or Fix, Plan for Change, Stay Informed) by providing a dual-dimension view, focused on who needs to act - whether that's IT operations acting in the admin centre, change teams communicating with end users, or simply staying informed.
The definition of product/service owner varies across organisations; we consider it to be the person accountable for the service, maximising the value it delivers to the organisation and minimising associated risks. A service owner would likely want to consider items in the service that are both admin-impacting and user-impacting.
Admin Impact
We define this broadly as anyone responsible for managing, configuring, or making decisions about the Microsoft 365 service - your IT operations team, service owners, and technical decision-makers.
🔴 High Admin Impact – Operations action required, new impacting capability or change in service: compliance and risk considerations. Often time sensitive.
Examples: New data retention policies requiring configuration, features rolling out enabled by default, security defaults being enforced, licensing changes affecting service availability, deprecated features, features that require admin intervention, or checking for configuration ensuring the change won’t break things.
🟠 Medium Admin Impact – Less impactful change in service; best practice still to consider. Less time sensitive.
Examples: New admin center features, optional policy settings and preview features becoming available.
🟢 Low Admin Impact – Information, marketing or minor change, limited impact, no operational task required.
Examples: Documentation updates, minor UI changes in admin centers, Microsoft blog announcements, marketing content.
User Impact
User impact measures how significantly the change affects the day-to-day experience of people using the service, and therefore which items warrant communication to your end users.
🔴 High User Impact – a significant change or improvement we believe will deliver enough value or impact to communicate to end users, including product or feature removal or significant experience change and changes to the current flow of work.
Examples: New Teams/Outlook clients, service being removed, significant new capability or UI experience.
🟠 Medium User Impact – A change that may be useful to users, consider communicating based on your business use cases or making information available for those interested.
Examples: Feature enhancements, new optional capabilities, improvements to less commonly used features.
🟢 Low User Impact – No impact on typical service users. Minor changes or changes that are operational, not end-user related.
Examples: Backend performance improvements, admin-only changes, infrastructure updates, admin operational changes.
Defining The 'End User'
For most Microsoft 365 services, this is straightforward; the people using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and similar applications are clearly end users, distinct from the IT admins who manage these services.
However, some services blur this line. In Purview, IT Ops can be both the “administrators” and "users" of the service. In Power Platform or Power BI, are the end users the creators building apps and reports, or the people consuming them?
We rate user impact based on whoever experiences the service as their primary tool, regardless of whether they have administrative permissions. If a change affects how IT Ops use the tool to investigate data breaches in Purview, that's high user impact because it changes their daily workflow, even though they're specialist users with elevated permissions.