What are your performance improvement team’s first priorities?
Developing a senior management support plan? Developing a stakeholder engagement plan? Developing a communication plan? Developing a data collection & modelling plan? Confirming your project status reporting schedule? Setting up your risk & issues registers?
…All essential, fundamental elements that will set you up for success!
Unfortunately your customer could not care less about these fundamentals and won’t be impressed that you’re spending time working on them.
The customer wants acknowledgement that the performance improvement team understands the pressure they are under to improve, that their goals are aligned, and that they are 100% dedicated.
A nicely formulated risk and issues register, whilst important, will not fill the customer with this sense of understanding, alignment, and dedication.
What will? Quick wins.
Quick wins are changes that don’t require significant analysis or effort. They tend to not deliver massive improvements in performance. However, what they do deliver is something much more valuable – momentum. They prove to the customer that your team’s goals are aligned and that you can deliver results together. They kick start your performance improvement journey!
Unfortunately quick wins are not without their challenges.
What’s often perceived to be a quick win project, turns out to actually be a complicated, costly, political, high risk project in disguise. This tends to be discovered too late, results in wasted months of labour and stakeholder time, no performance improvement, and a wedge in the relationship between the performance improvement team and the customer.
So how do you accurately classify a quick win project? We utilise the following approach.
- Conduct a change impact assessment
Map the required changes to deliver the quick win project. This will give you the fundamental information to assess the project against the following criteria.
- Determine the number of impacted stakeholder groups
How many stakeholder groups are impacted by the changes? One or two groups? Quick win. Move to step 3.
If a significant proportion of the organisation is impacted – not a quick win. Larger numbers of stakeholders increase engagement time and the likelihood of resistance.
- Map the magnitude of the change
What specifically changes for the impacted stakeholders? Is it a simple change to an existing process, system or behaviour? Quick win. Move to step 4.
If you need to reinvent the way stakeholders work or behave, or add a new system – not a quick win. Process re design and system implementations require significant time and resources.
- Determine the resistance to change
How vocal are the impacted stakeholders on the proposed change? Accommodating, supportive and keen to be involved? Quick win. Move to step 5.
If you’re hearing murmurs of negativity from multiple stakeholders – not a quick win. It is likely that your management team will have to invest significant time managing the resistance and driving the change.
- Determine how easy is it to obtain funding
Are the changes cheap to make? Can the decision to spend the required money be made by line management? Quick win. Move to step 6.
There is nothing quick about obtaining unbudgeted money from senior stakeholders. If the change requires additional financial approval – not a quick win.
- Analyse exposure to additional risks
Conduct a quick risk assessment. Do the proposed changes expose the organisation to additional safety, operational, financial, reputational risks? No? Quick win.
Before senior leadership accept additional risk exposure they will want complicated analysis completed. Even then there are no guarantees they’ll accept it – not a quick win.
If your projects meet these criteria you’ve got a true set of quick wins that will give you the valuable momentum you need.
About 3 Ps in Profit
Our Vision: Enabling more Australian small & medium businesses to succeed & thrive through genuine partnerships that deliver performance improvement & growth.
Our Mission: Improving & growing Australian small & medium businesses by focusing on the three fundamental elements that drive performance; planning & alignment, processes & systems, and people.
Want to find our more? We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your performance improvement objectives and how we can help you achieve them.