By Jett Palmer (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo)
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Statisticians and data scientists have traditionally been positioned as technical experts within interdisciplinary collaborations. With the advent of artificial intelligence, there is a growing opportunity and need for statisticians to play more central, decision-oriented roles in business. Existing frameworks, such as ASCCR (Vance & Smith, 2019), support this goal but were not designed to assess project outcomes. To address this gap, we argue that statistical practitioners should routinely plan for, evaluate, and communicate the impact of their work. This paper proposes an extension of the ASCCR framework that embeds impact assessment into the statistical collaborator's workflow. Specifically, we introduce a novel tool that supports both prospective impact planning and retrospective evaluation. The instrument has been validated by experts from industry and academia and tested with students in undergraduate and graduate statistical collaboration courses. By making impact an explicit component of collaborative practice, this paper seeks to strengthen statisticians' ability to translate evidence into action and achieve meaningful, real-world outcomes. This has been implemented at two four-year universities (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and University of Colorado Boulder) with approximately 50 upperclassmen who study statistics or applied mathematics. The primary course is a statistical consulting capstone. This work builds on several externally-validated contributions to statistics education by Heather Smith, Eric Vance, et al., including the ASCCR Frame (2019) and the QQQ Workflow (2025). By eCOTS 2026, our impact tool will have been tested by student cohorts at the universities as well as formally reviewed by an expert panel of statistical practitioners from industry and academia using pre/post surveys and computer-aided personal interviews.