- Identify clear pause points (the points at which you / the team must stop to run through a set of checks before proceeding).
- Consider preparing checklists for all stages of the process ("during the research phase, during decision making, during execution of the decision, and even in the period after making an investment when one should be monitoring for problems").
- Consider choosing a DO-CONFIRM (instead of a READ-DO) format. It gives greater flexibility in performing the tasks while nonetheless having you stop at key points to confirm that critical steps have not been overlooked.
- Keep the checklist short (generally, 5-9 items, although in some contexts it makes sense to make them longer) by focusing on "the killer items" — the steps that are most dangerous to skip and sometimes overlooked nonetheless (checklists are NOT comprehensive how-to guides; they are for supporting expert professionals; they shouldn't include the steps that experts virtually never fail to perform when necessary).
- Use simple and exact wording, familiar language (eliminate / weed out ambiguity, otherwise the checklist is unusable, complicates things).
- Ensure clean look and, ideally, make the checklist fit on one page (free of clutter and unnecessary colors; use both uppercase and lowercase text for ease of reading).
- (!) Test the checklist in the real world. First drafts always fall apart, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently.
- Checklists are living organisms. It's totally OK for them to change over time.
jun 22 2019 ∞
jul 11 2019 +
