A friend of mine, a hospital administrator, sent me an article about the use of checklists in healthcare — http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122226184
The article discusses the book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. Checklists are a simple tool, yet amazingly effective. Airplane pilots have used them for years. Dr. Gawande uses checklists himself in surgery. In the article he says “I have not gotten through a week of surgery where the checklist has not caught a problem.”.
Checklists are also quite useful in business. Our IssueTrak customers implement checklists using the tasks function. We have one customer who has a standard set of tasks (or “checklist”) for bringing on a new employee that has over 80 steps.
Internally, we use checklists implemented via IssueTrak to specify all kinds of processes, from adding a new hosted customer, doing an onsite customer visit, sending out an evaluation copy to a prospect, to the old stand-by, adding a new employee.
In the current economic environment, where fewer people are doing more work, it is more important than ever to be sure processes are spelled out, and followed. We see more and more customers doing that with IssueTrak.
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