Checklists as a Continuous Improvement Tool

Many people write about using checklists as a one-way process, like this:

Where the role of a checklist is to ensure conformance to the desired process, usually determined by people other than those using the checklist.

This one-way communication is missing out on a valuable opportunity to engage people who are using the checklist to provide ideas for improvement.

Plan > Do > Check > Act

Most people are familiar with the Plan>Do>Check>Act continuous improvement process made popular by W. Edwards Deming.

It’s Continuous

The most obvious difference PDCA has from the diagram at the top of this post is that it iscontinuous and benefits from iterations of doing and analyzing.

Six Sigma

A more recently developed process improvement methodology is Six Sigma and is data driven approach to eliminating defects in any process.

Iterative!

Again of note is the continuous cycle of improvement and analysis built into this methodology.

Iterations, Iterations, Iterations

As with building software, iterations are the key to creating useful checklists. Here’s what Atul Gawande said about the first version of the famous surgery checklist.

The checklist was too long. It was unclear. And past a certain point, it was starting to feel like a distraction from the person we had on the table. By the end of the day, we had stopped using the checklist.

Several versions later however the surgery checklist became a world wide hospital tool and the average number of complications and deaths dipped by 35 percent.

So what is the best way to gather ideas to be used in a continuous improvement process? Ask questions. And questions are an indicator of a good checklist as we wrote in our “Effective Checklists” article.

Explicitly Ask For Ideas

All checklists should end with the same step.

Do you have ideas for improving this process?

With this simple step at the end of your checklists, you will gather more and better ideas for process improvement as well as signal to your staff that their ideas matter (and so does the checklist).

Good Checklists Respect & Engage

Some final thoughts on checklists from the Checklist Manifesto

Good checklists

“… do not try to spell out everything — a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps.”

Bad checklists

“They treat people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.”