How to Manage the Hidden Cost of Quick Fixes
We've all been tempted to ask for or make a quick fix, but it comes with a hidden cost. Let's talk about how to mitigate the impact of these requests.
For starters, I'm not advocating to eliminate quick fixes.
Often it's worth doing them to ensure that your stakeholders are able to keep moving a process forward or get the insights needed from systems.
But, each quick fix comes with a hidden cost that is like another purchase on a credit card in the form of technical debt.
How do we keep these quick fixes from making you technically bankrupt?
Track your quick fixes as they're requested and delivered to see if there are any trends from specific stakeholders or departments, along with the systems impacted
Dedicate time regularly to pay down the balance by deprecating or creating a more robust approach to satisfy the underlying needs of each quick fix
Deflect requests as needed if you're seeing a trend emerge with specific stakeholders or don't have time to reduce the cumulative impact of prior quick fixes
Let's see how this works with an example.
A stakeholder makes a request to see how Q4 revenue compares to last year, so they ask for two calculated fields to be added to customers within CRM for "Q4 2023 Revenue" and "Q4 2024 Revenue".
Seems innocuous enough, right?
I bet you can also see how this won't scale.
If this stakeholder often comes with requests that can be satisfied in other ways (e.g. running a report and using that to gain whatever insights are needed), we can deflect by:
Positioning what is available to them with existing capabilities
Identifying what is already being worked on that would need to be delayed or deferred
Assuming that is not the case, we can implement their request and track what was done, plus any ideas that we have at the time on how it could be implemented more robustly.
Then, when we dedicate time to reduce the impact of these quick fixes, we're able to:
Deprecate it by removing those fields and direct stakeholders to an analytics or BI platform
Create a more robust approach using fields like "Prior Q4 Revenue" and "Current Q4 Revenue" that are filtered in a relative sense (i.e. not a specific year like 2023)
TLDR: Track your quick fixes, dedicate time to address them properly, and learn to deflect when you're getting inundated.
