Every business has the ultimate goal of achieving success. This success lies in both short-term and long-term goals. The decision-makers face two options; making decisions that give instant success or making decisions that bring success later on. While long-term success is the ultimate goal, your business must focus more on what’s happening today. After all, there are bills to pay, and that can only happen when there’s money coming in. This is where the term “quick win” comes into play.
But What are Quick Wins, Exactly?
Quick wins are solutions that businesses can implement to reap instant benefits. They are improvements to the business or decisions you can make today that bring benefits without being too costly or causing disruptions. They are improvements that are easy to achieve, are beneficial to the business, and show success quickly.
Why are quick wins important for achieving goals?
There are many reasons your organisation should use quick wins to achieve its goals. Here is the importance of quick wins for achieving goals.
- Offers Motivation: Achieving success right at the beginning of a project is sure to get everyone motivated and willing to go the extra mile. Your team will naturally want to do more when they see their efforts bearing fruits.
- Boosts Confidence: Quick wins give everyone the desire to keep going. They know that what they’re doing is going to pay and are not afraid to move forward with their decisions.
- Brings Momentum: Success will propel everyone forward and provide stepping stones for performance. When you check how far you’ve come and how fast you’re moving, you get the strength to push even harder.
In simple terms, quick wins can be defined as those things that you push for that guarantee immediate success. They are visible changes that guarantee immediate impact.
Characteristics of quick wins
Some of the characteristics of quick wins include:
- Give tangible results
- Are low risk
- Require minimum to no expenditure
- Stakeholders will buy into the idea
- High confidence in a positive impact
- Taking a narrow and focused scope
- Improvements can be implemented immediately.
How are quick wins different from long-term strategies?
Quick wins involve seeing results fast enough. These are necessary wins for any business that is starting because it needs them to move forward. It can be about making revenue to run the business or winning customers.
The long-term strategy involves where the business is headed. Where do you see yourself after a given period, say five years? It could be winning clients and turning them into business partners. Unlike quick wins, which are instant, long-term strategies take time to achieve and require careful planning.
How to Identify Opportunities for Quick Wins?
Before swinging into action with any project, you must have confidence that it will generate quick wins. Identifying opportunities for quick wins involves the following:
Set clear goals and objectives
When you already have a clear vision of what your quick wins look like, you have to set goals and objectives for achieving them. Decide which goal you want to work on first and its objectives.
To understand the goals that will likely give you quick wins, start by checking the goals that your team or organisation already has in place. Sort these goals to have a clear view of the ones that will work best to bring quick wins.
Conduct a thorough analysis of the current situation
Once you have your goals, you must identify opportunities and challenges in your current situation. These should be both internal and external, and they will affect your desire to achieve quick wins. Use your findings to help you plan your route and visualise your success.
Identify low-hanging fruit and areas for improvement
Low-hanging fruits are those tasks that are easy to accomplish and will help you achieve your quick wins. You need to identify, implement, and improve them where necessary.
How to Implement Quick Wins?
To implement quick wins and achieve ultimate success, you have to do the following:
Create a specific action plan for each quick win opportunity
Now is the time to bring your team together and have an action plan for implementing your quick win. You can start by delegating tasks to each individual, giving them a deadline. Your responsibility will be to make decisions, coordinate efforts, and ensure everyone remains on track. When everyone has a responsibility, it will improve their morale and propel the whole process forward.
Allocate necessary resources and set realistic timelines
Of course, you won’t move forward when you don’t have the resources needed to do the work. Ensure you gather all the required resources and allocate them for specific purposes. Don’t forget to give your team specific timelines for finishing their tasks. The timelines must be realistic enough, depending on the scope of work.
How to Evaluate the Impact of Quick Wins
At the end of it all, everyone wants to see success. Your team wants to know what they’ve achieved, and stakeholders are looking forward to seeing positive results.
Track and measure the progress of quick-win initiatives
When you already have people working and have allocated all the necessary resources, all you have to do is get the work going. To ensure everything is working as planned, you must consistently measure the success and progress of the process. Make sure everything is working as planned, and your team is performing their specific tasks. Measuring and tracking success will also help you know if something is amiss and correct it.
Analyse the outcomes and benefits achieved
If everything goes smoothly, then you’ll be able to see your quick wins within a short period of time. At the end of the project, you want to see the outcomes and benefits you’ve achieved. It’s time to analyse them and see if they’re indeed what you planned for.
Leveraging Quick Wins for Long-Term Success
Quick wins may be short-term achievements, but they form the foundation for long-term success. How you leverage them to achieve the desired results is what makes the difference.
Well, small moves can make a big difference in giving your team the necessary momentum and confidence to keep going and take on even bigger projects. When your team is fuelled by momentum, they will have the confidence to get things done and achieve quick wins. This confidence will elevate the team’s performance and propel them to success.
Overcoming Challenges and Pitfalls
The journey to achieving quick wins is not always smooth. You’re going to meet various challenges, pitfalls, and setbacks. You must identify them and plan how you’re going to overcome them.
Some challenges that might get in your way include limited resources, a lack of motivation, setting unclear expectations, and intimidating your team members to achieve success. Start by writing down potential obstacles, then go through each to identify how to overcome them.
You also need to develop risk mitigation strategies and appropriate steps to minimise them. Be aware of the potential risks you’ll face on your journey to achieving quick wins, and then encourage everyone to adopt a forward-thinking approach towards risk mitigation.
An example of a quick win
Amira gets promoted to a supervisory role after her current supervisor quits. Despite having other competitive candidates, she needs to prove that she’s the right fit for the job. She moves with speed to get the support of her team and create a successful project. They even adopt new technology to get things going.
After three months of putting in all the effort, Amira, together with her team, managed to implement new strategies and come up with new tools to get the work done quickly and achieve the desired success. In the end, she ends up impressing her bosses as well as putting together a team that is willing to work together towards a common goal.
Amira not only secures her position as the new supervisor, but she also proves that she can do the job and impresses her bosses. She also discovers new technologies and tools that can make her work easier. Finally, she puts together a team willing to go the extra mile to achieve both short-term and long-term success.
Conclusion
Quick wins provide opportunities for organisations and individuals to demonstrate their potential and value. It builds morale and motivation to perform specific tasks with the goal of seeing success. It helps signal success to stakeholders and encourages talent into the business.
Quick wins are just a foundation for long-term success. Every business needs to start somewhere to achieve success, and this is only possible if you start small through quick wins. It’s all about setting directions to where the business is headed and taking advantage of the day-to-day wins.
Do you want to learn more about how you can implement quick wins to skyrocket your business’s success? Agile Management Office is here for you. We provide organisations with change solutions based on agile practices that bring the desired changes and results.
Want to find out more about how AMO can help with your project management capability? Have a look here (https://agilemanagementoffice.com/consult/) how our team can help yours reach their full project management potential. If you want to know more, contact us on contact@agilemanagementoffice.com