When it comes to Continuous Process Improvement, action is what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter at all what training you provide, what slogans you use or what posters you post if you don’t take action quickly to do, measure and stabilize things so that the solution sticks.
‘Quick Wins’ is a powerful tool to get teams into action.
But It’s easier to say it than do it. In this article, we’ll look at quick wins, why they’re important, what can go wrong, and how to increase your chances of success.
What is a ‘quick win’?
The key elements are there in those two words: it has to be fast and it has to be successful.
A Quick Win should be completed in 4-6 weeks max, but many are implemented much faster, such as in a “lightning kaizen” where a small group focuses full time on an improvement for a day or two or part time per week. one week .
Due to the imperative of speed, if a solution requires a significant capital investment, it will not be a quick win. If it requires a large team or cross-functional buy-in, it’s likely to be a slow win if it’s successful.
Many Quick Wins don’t require a formal team; often a natural teamwork can identify the problem and implement a quick fix. For a solution to become a Quick Win, it is almost always an improvement that can be completed with the people closest to the work and the resources at hand.
Sometimes a quick win is a high-value upgrade executed quickly. But even an improvement with a small financial impact can have a large ROI, because the time and expense involved is so low, and the organization starts reaping the benefits very quickly.
Why do quick wins matter?
According to John Kotter, author of Leading Change and The Heart of Change, creating Quick Wins builds momentum, calms cynics, enlightens naysayers, and energizes people. Education, quickly followed by action, produces motivation and success inspires success. Theoretical opportunities and methodologies are meaningless until a person begins to see the possibilities through practical real-life process improvement.
So Quick Win is a shot of adrenaline for a continuous improvement culture or continuous change effort. The people involved derive great satisfaction from making the work more effective, more efficient, or less costly. Your effort pays off, and it pays off quickly. They are more inclined to look for another similar improvement.
People who see or hear about Quick Win are often inspired to start looking for their own Quick Wins. Therefore, the motivational value of a Quick Win makes the return on effort even greater.
but there is more
A Quick Win starts to pay off sooner and this can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the upgrade.
Each enhancement eventually becomes obsolete, as needs change and new options emerge. If a project that produces benefits equal to $1,000 each week is implemented in two weeks, it provides benefits for the remaining 50 weeks of the year.
If it takes 22 weeks to implement, you have 20 weeks less pay, which equates to an opportunity cost of $20,000. Also, enthusiasm and focus tend to dissipate as time goes on.
People are distracted, scopes increase, priorities change, and resources are redeployed. The shorter the time between start and finish, the less time people will spend in meetings, trying to remember where they left off and who said they were going to do what, and taking minutes and status reports.
The longer the project, the more likely the team will lose members or disband before completion; when that happens, the work they completed can go to waste entirely.
By contrast, a two-day kaizen blitz has very little overhead and is almost always completed before the team is disbursed.
Therefore, Quick Wins is essential for morale and motivation, especially when people are just starting to learn and internalize continuous process improvement or when interest is waning. They produce results over longer periods and have less overhead and cancellation risk.
In short, Quick Wins is an indispensable tool for any organization that is continually improving!
Quick win risks
But going after Quick Wins is not a safe strategy.
Without effective leadership, an organization can end up with rapid failure. Here are some of the potential dangers of Quick Wins:
To implement a solution quickly, a team can skip the analysis. This is fine in situations where it’s easy to quickly determine if the solution worked. If testing the solution is cheap and it’s quick and easy to determine if it solved the problem, then just do it!
In such a situation, measuring results is all the analysis you need. But if the results aren’t likely to be visible or measurable quickly, it’s best to do more analysis up front to make sure the solution you want to implement actually produces improvements.
For example, if an organization is concerned about employee morale, there are many quick changes that can be made in the hope of improving morale. But organizational morale cannot be measured on a daily or even weekly basis. It could take many months to know if a change was really for the better. In a situation like this, it is essential to do more analysis in advance to choose the right solution.
Sometimes when you’re aiming for speed, you’re too quick to judge, resulting in sub-optimization. The first idea is the only idea, when a more careful consideration of the alternatives would yield a substantially better solution.
An organization may simply resort to a band-aid, patch, or workaround instead of a solution that addresses the root cause. These band-aids can accumulate to represent a fairly large component of the waste itself.
Often a Quick Win is really just an idea someone has “on the shelf” which is an idea they’ve been carrying around for a while. When an organization is introduced to continuous improvement, an avalanche of these ideas can emerge.
But an idea out of the box does not provide a real “learning cycle” in systematic process improvement because eventually people run out of ideas “on the shelf.”
Unless an organization really internalizes the search for waste, the study of facts and data, the search for root causes and the tests and then the standardization of the solution, they will not know how to continue improving once these ideas “on the shelf” come true. used
However, speed does not necessarily mean that a team should cut corners in process improvement methodology.
Thoughtful exploration of alternatives may be limited by time. Even 30 minutes of brainstorming alternatives or improvements to an idea can make a difference. Allowing 24 hours for feedback and improvements on the idea can identify ways to make it even better, with minimal impact on speed.
Finally, here are some quick thoughts that can help you successfully implement a Quick Win upgrade:
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Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
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Eat one elephant bite at a time (Manage the size of the scope)
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Trust those close to work