Checklist Manifesto
Software industry has instilled healthy disgust for checklist as we were using checklist for various activities in the project development life cycle. I am not sure if anyone had (has) done the study to measure the improvement from uses of checklist in software development process. Irrespective, people on the ground used to, I think they continue to, treat using checklist as grunt work. Invariably checklist used to have over 25 points and people just used to check it without much thought. But people had to use as most of the software company were on journey to become CMM-5 certified and had to ensure they have processes defined and tracked as per guidelines.
With this background, when I first saw the book ‘Checklist Manifesto’ by Atul Gawande I thought it is another book with all the nice sounding tools and techniques to make your life easy, theoretically, but quite unpractical. But when I read few positive reviews about the book, I decided to read it.
I just finished it reading and am quite a convert because book is based on author’s journey from identifying the need to improve the surgical performance, to identify the successful creation and implementation checklist, to defining and using a checklist for surgical operation and establishing a value from checklist uses.
He has captured very well why we hate using checklist and what are basic mistakes people make while designing a checklist. The concept such as ‘confirm-do’ and ‘read-do’ classification of checklist, duration (number of points) checklist should take for review, identifying the clear review points are very insightful ideas towards making checklist work. He also checked the uses of checklist in finance and confirmed some of the best value investors uses very extensive checklist before making investment. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in investing as there are much similarities between investing and surgical treatment such as both are very complex activity, has to deal uncertainty, has to deal with valuables (life and money) etc.
With this background, when I first saw the book ‘Checklist Manifesto’ by Atul Gawande I thought it is another book with all the nice sounding tools and techniques to make your life easy, theoretically, but quite unpractical. But when I read few positive reviews about the book, I decided to read it.
I just finished it reading and am quite a convert because book is based on author’s journey from identifying the need to improve the surgical performance, to identify the successful creation and implementation checklist, to defining and using a checklist for surgical operation and establishing a value from checklist uses.
He has captured very well why we hate using checklist and what are basic mistakes people make while designing a checklist. The concept such as ‘confirm-do’ and ‘read-do’ classification of checklist, duration (number of points) checklist should take for review, identifying the clear review points are very insightful ideas towards making checklist work. He also checked the uses of checklist in finance and confirmed some of the best value investors uses very extensive checklist before making investment. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in investing as there are much similarities between investing and surgical treatment such as both are very complex activity, has to deal uncertainty, has to deal with valuables (life and money) etc.
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