[IMAGE MISSING: Quick-win-e1286289878315.jpg]
"Quick wins" and "low-hanging fruits" are two names of easy progresses

We aim at being as thorough as possible in our analysis, and we’ve found that they’re a lot of value doing it, but remember to seize quick wins along the way.

Recognize quick wins

The nice part about being methodical in our approach—through the use of logic trees, for instance—is that we investigate all the dimensions of our problem. Doing so, you look at parts of your operation that you never really think twice about, and sometimes you’ll identify little victories along the way.

Quick wins—or the proverbial low-hanging fruits—are small improvements that are easy to pursue and that, if you seize them, do not preclude you from pursuing an overarching solution strategy later on. It’s important that you limit your pursuing quick wins to actions that wouldn’t force you to solve your problem one way or another later on; indeed, you don’t want to commit to a path of action until you’ve carried out your complete analysis. Also, along our discussion of the Pareto principle, it’s important that your pursuit of quick wins doesn’t distract you significantly from finding a general solution to your problem.

Benefit from them

But if you can find small, noncommittal victories seize them, because they’ll help you out in various ways.

[IMAGE MISSING: 3.78-Contribution-of-quick-wins-1024x732.png]
They help pay for your project. Contrary to novels and movies where you want to finish in a big bang and leave your audience in awe, in business it is much better to move in incremental bits, not surprising your audience/client/boss. If you can add value bit by bit that, eventually, results in large gains, all the better. Seizing quick wins will help you achieve that. This concept is somewhat parallel to Anderson’s The long tail, which argues that one of the competitive advantages of Amazon over brick-and-mortar book sellers is its ability to carry in its stock books that are low in demand; each book might sell to just a few persons but there are many books in that situation, so if you’re able to serve that demand, the compounded sales volume is significant.

The same reasoning goes with quick wins: implement a few, and they might add up to significant savings, money- or effort-wise.

They help establish an environment of success.  Find a victory here and there, get the related praises, and all of a sudden everyone will feel better: your team is more motivated and you make a better impression.