Using checklists in service design
As I stepped out of a pick-up truck, the construction manager — my guide for the day — handed me a hard-hat and beckoned me towards a gleaming mass of steel, the current state of an unfinished office building just north of Paris.
Across Sweden and the Netherlands, four of my fellow researchers were also conducting contextual inquiries across various building sites ranging from an airline warehouse to a nautical-themed luxury hotel.
In New York, my counterpart sat with architects while they walked her through their 3D modelling workflows and how our client’s tools served (or did not serve) their needs.
Unbeknownst to sales reps across home improvement stores in Russia, two of my colleagues acted as mystery shoppers, analysing their experience as customers purchasing residential flooring.
All these things happened in parallel — and I was not only a local researcher exploring buildings sites across France, but also co-managing the project across 3 sectors and 5 countries. Logistically, this meant that by day, I was immersed in the universe of construction management and in the background:
- Aligning stakeholders across different work cultures, both regionally and functionally
- Managing client participation in contextual research
- Understanding how insights across the three sectors affect each other
- Ensuring standardised research methodology and output across sectors and regions
In design strategy consulting, complex engagements like these are not uncommon, and will only increase in complexity as larger, more diverse and specialised companies understand the business value of design-driven organisations and move towards incorporating design processes within their workflow.
So, how does a team manage the micro and macro without letting things slip through the cracks?
Inspired by Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, we’ve been trialling the use of checklists.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s appraisal of Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto, he categorises the existence of errors as, “errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know.)” Gawande’s checklists tackle the second type of error, and has been effective across diverse industries ranging from aviation to venture capital.
The checklist ensures that basic but critical tasks have been completed, and in situations where people working together don’t necessarily know each other well, also serves as a rapid yet effective team-bonding exercise in itself.
Within the healthcare industry, surgical teams are formed minutes before the first incision is made. The WHO surgical safety checklist covers routine tasks such as making sure the patient has been provided with infection-preventing antibiotics before the surgery. By relegating the completion of these regular yet essential tasks to a checklist, each individual can focus all their mental energy on their expertise. Introducing the checklist has also had a corollary effect — team members were now properly, if briefly, introduced before being thrown into surgery together.
So, what was the impact of this new process? The World Health Organisation trialled the checklist across hospitals in both developed and developing countries, and has found that it can decrease post-surgical mortality by up to 47 percent.
Checklists in service design projects
As t-shaped service design consultants, we are all expected to take on engagement management responsibilities within projects in addition to representing our specialisation. Aside from freeing up mental bandwidth, we plan to use checklists to accomplish a few other things:
Embedding mindful considerations into sprints
The process of crafting a checklist allows us the opportunity to build-in consideration for areas that we might not naturally touch upon. For example, each project kick-off checklist includes a question on what each team member wants to get out of the project — whether that’s trying out new research methods or doing more stakeholder management. Having this discussion provides our consultants with a chance to reflect on their personal development goals, and ensures that we consider how to make projects more personally rewarding for each team member.
Aligning people on process and contingencies
As with surgical teams, it’s the nature of consulting to have interdisciplinary project teams that are quickly assembled and disbanded. This is even more pronounced since our acquisition, as the potential make-up of a project team ranges from business anthropologists to blockchain developers. A checklist can be used as a reference to align team members unfamiliar with our processes.
Equally, the checklist can serve a range of alignment situations whether that’s onboarding new joiners to our own team, supporting more junior team members with the mechanics of leading projects, or promoting awareness of the full project lifecycle from RfP evaluation to publicly presenting success cases.
Centralising our resources
We’ve all experienced hunting for files on a beastly company drive. In every checklist, we include specific documents for each process so that any team member has quick access to the relevant resources. For example, our recruitment checklist links to our list of suppliers, a screener template and a consent form template. Keeping these resources centralised also ensures that everyone is using the most updated version.
If you’re curious, check out example templates of our kick-off and guerilla research checklists. At Globant, we store all our checklists as tabs on a master Google sheet that’s accessible to everyone. At the beginning of each engagement, the project lead makes a copy of the master sheet and customises it to suit the project.
We also produce checklists for our clients. As part of rolling out the London Met Police’s new website, we trained 1,400 police officers in using social media to communicate with their local residents — whether that’s responding to a non-emergency crime, sharing operation outcomes or promoting a local event. At the end of each session, we gave out laminated checklists that fit into officers’ patrol pocketbooks for on-the-go reference.
Integrating checklists as part of your process
Following the stunning success of the World Health Organisation study, researchers tried to replicate the same process across hospitals in the US and UK. However, they were surprised to find that checklists produced little or no impact. In fact, these initiatives were failing because of the way they were implemented:
When the researchers watched a smaller number of procedures in person, they found that practitioners often failed to give the checks their full attention, and read only two-thirds of the items out loud. In slightly more than 40% of cases, at least one team member was absent during the checks; 10% of the time, the lead surgeon was missing.
Through interviews, researchers learned that checklists didn’t have the necessary buy-in as they were often being introduced as top-down initiatives or seen as too rigid for different hospital environments. Out of these findings and our experience, we’ve identified some principles for implementing checklists:
- Make sure that checklists exist in a format that is relevant to your users’ contexts. As consultants, we’re normally on our laptops and need to easily collaborate so our checklists are stored on Google Drive. This is a completely different context than a police officer, who needs the checklist to be accessible and durable.
- Include checklists into an existing process, such as a team kick-off or daily stand-up, instead of creating an additional commitment.
- Enlist practitioners as checklist champions, and give them the freedom to adapt them to suit their teams’ needs.
Let us know what you think in the comments below, and feel free to share your own checklists.
