When Quick Fixes Make Sense

As the people responsible for delivering digital transformation, it's imperative that we strike a balance that ensures we're delivering value now while not setting ourselves a trap that prevents us from delivering value later.

A quick fix allows progress to continue, even though that might be a suboptimal solution.

Ideally, all three of these criteria should be met before making a quick fix:

1. There's a genuinely time-sensitive need
2. The impact is isolated to a single process or system
3. You have capacity to review and refactor later

The reason why we're aiming for all three to be true is because quick fixes have hidden costs that can compound quickly.

If some or all of those criteria are not met and a stakeholder is applying pressure to move forward with the quick fix, you can use these questions to explore why:

1. If you don't have a time-sensitive need, why does it need to be done now?
2. If the impact extends to more than one business process or system, will it be hard to unwind or change it later because of additional dependencies?
3. If you don't have capacity to implement an optimal solution later, will this open the door requesting delivery of additional suboptimal solutions?

TLDR: Move forward with quick fixes when there is real time pressure, its impact is isolated, and you can revisit to create a more robust solution later.