How to use checklists effectively in your tech company | Hacker News Reader

How to use checklists effectively in your tech company

blog.netguru.co

28 pointsfilozynka23 comments

It's kinda cliched for someone with a username containing "ops" to come out and say "i love checklists", but i do!

I've never found a better tool for communicating what to do and in what order. Everyone just understands them, with zero training. You can even play with the format slightly and people still get it, e.g. break out a formal time column? Sure! People just start using it.

I especially like them for high pressure situations. E.g. for handling prod outages i've consistently found checklists work better in practice than flow charts, knowledge bases, call trees... etc.

I use them for many things, from the fairly benign (releases?) to the relatively rare (new joiners).

I recommend, just based on my experiences so may not apply in all environments, using a simple web based app to handle all your check lists. It'll be accessible from any device, without installing anything up front.

A couple of small extra features will make it infinitely more useful:

1) Allow for both a "ticked" / done status and a "working on" / "i've grabbed this one" status. Display the user who's grabbed it and the time they grabbed it.

2) Allow for checklists to have all their boxes reset on a schedule, e.g. daily reset of the "start of day" check list.

3) Archive completed checklists - they capture useful information about who and when, so I don't bin them when they're completed

Can you recommend any those web tools please?

A checklist can be as simple as an spread sheet, so you could use:

-A shared network- or Dropbox folder containing Excel sheets

-A google docs account with check list spreadsheets

-Smartsheet.com

-Any wiki software, self-hosted or managed, i.e. wikidot etc.

-Any of the myriad of todo-list apps, just be sure the todo-lists (actually checklists) can be re-used as templates.

I also think in this case the simpler the better. GitHub pages is pretty nice solution. +100 to Google Docs too!

great insights, thanks for sharing!

From experience, a checklist should be exactly that: a way of checking this off a list once complete. "Did I do this?" - "Yes". Check.

But for me a checklist should never be a step-by-step guide. "Do this, then do this." People are reluctant to be told how to do things that can easily take more than one path.

I handle that by doing stuff like:

    [ ] Copy foo data file to foo server
        [ ] "scp foo.dat server:/path/to/foo.dat"
    [ ] Copy bar data file to bar server
        [ ] "scp bar.dat server:/path/to/bat.dat"

It's a reminder of one way to do it, but it's not necessarily the only way of doing it.

I am plagued by the exact opposite of this. I hate providing step-by-step checklist/step-by-step guides that can follow multiple paths, yet am surrounded by people who are constantly asking for them so they can avoid needing to learn about how things actually work

I'm a big fan of checklists too. I find juniors don't like using them until they've made the same mistake many times, and then eventually they swear by them.

It's not a manual, it's not a process, it's just a checklist.

What about people who have done the same task many times? I imagine that they would also be reluctant to follow it closely enough.

Yes. There is resistance from the "I've been here for XXX years crowd" but they can be co-opted into helping write the checklists. Especially if the existence of the checklist allows them to pawn off the grunt work to juniors.

So as soon as I start scrolling down to the article I get a bloody great pop-up obscuring most of the text, making it impossible to read.

Checklist item:

* Make sure your web site is actually usable.

Funny, for a company called "Net Guru."

Added in edit: Looking at the posting history, I'd guess filozynka is associated with the company. So, if you read this, it would take me time and effort to take screenshots of the multiple problems and issues I have with your web site. Do you want me to do that?

Deleted comment

No, it's a pop-up from the bottom, overlaying the main text, reading:

    Netguru is a Ruby on Rails
    web development consulting
    company.

    Find out more

    Popular posts:

    Why hourly rate is better than
    fixed price

    Your Backbone will say Thank
    You

... and so on. The Twitter follow button and Tumblr button neatly overlay and obscure the navigation options at top right.

Here - screenshot: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/NetGuru.png

thanks. we'll look in to it!

Colin,

which browser are you using? Looks good here.

FireFox 11.0 on Ubuntu 10.10. Screen size 1024x768.

At the end, this article mentions Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto (although the title is mangled in the link). Gawande's 2007 New Yorker article that was the basis for that book can be read here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...

What tools do people use to manage the checklists? (some features I am looking for: easy to write new checklists, view history, allow to discuss them, ...)

I know about http://howtracker.com is there anything else out there?

I'm testing http://launchlist.net/ right now. Looks solid

A TODO.txt file shared over dropbox has worked for me for the lsst 4 years (yes, i keep the whole history in a DONE.txt file!)

I think that's a bit different. Checklists are reusable and shared. It's not a one-time todolist

are you using "checklists" internally? how do encourage people to use them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com