Agreements between organizations impose expectations, constraints, and boundaries. These factors result in complex dependencies and fuzzy boundaries, difficulties that mean many aspects of agreements are often left implicit. The Influence Mapping Analysis (IMA) technique exposes the real nature and the actual implications of existing agreements.

IMA helps program managers, portfolio managers, and government policy makers make expectations, constraints, and boundaries explicit in order to recommend needed changes (e.g., alternative incentive policies). Through IMA, they gain

• shared understanding of key interrelationships and their attributes, and how they influence decisions made by system-of-systems stakeholders
• identification of differences between stakeholders' perceptions of interrelationships
• differences between the official view of interrelationships and the ground truth

Using IMA produces influence maps for

• Context—depicts high-level, system-of-systems-wide information about contractual, funding, requirements, hardware, oversight, and build/integrate influence relationships from the global system-of-systems entity perspective
• Nodes—portrays information about contractual, funding, requirements, hardware, oversight, and build/integrate influence relationships from the perspective of individual constituents
• Agreements—represents information about needs, offers, expectations, intentions, and negotiated agreements between the constituents involved in the influence relationship

This technique has been used to diagnose root causes of mismatches in schedules, deliverables, and expectations in system-of-system contexts.