Checklists for IT

As an author I'm inclined to use this forum to promote our book exclusively but today I'm going to make an exception.  I'm excited and intrigued about “The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande.  The author is a doctor who has done a great deal of research into how checklists can effectively reduce medical mistakes and improve outcomes. 

Checklists are a proven way to eliminate simple mistakes like trying to land with the gear still up.At its heart the book is really about how professionals in this day and age address the increasing complexity of their responsibilities.  It’s full of interesting anecdotes and practical guidance. I think it’s highly relevant to the very difficult work we do everyday in IT. As systems become more and more integrated and complicated it's no longer possible for a single smart person to hold everything all in his or her head. There's tremendous opportunity to reduce mistakes and improve system quality through the greater use of documented procedures. It's a discipline that IT professionals once had in the mainframe era but we seem to have lost to a large extent in the more wild and wooly era of distributed computing.

Gawande found that most doctors were initially resistant to the use of checklists.  After all, they're skilled professionals with years of education and training behind them.  Why would they need a checklist? We as IT professionals tend to react to checklists the same way.  Having a documented approach or procedure to follow is somehow demeaning to us but in truth these things can actually make us better and smarter.  By minimizing the risks of making simple mistakes we can better apply our experience and knowledge to the most challenging problems. Every time we execute a complex procedure using a tried and true checklist it's not just us alone doing that work.  In the room with us is every IT pro that has used that same standard procedure before and helped make it better.

-Mike Hagan-

Comments

[Gaurav Rampal]

Excellent idea.

I propose we start with:

1. Checklist for SLAs and Service Contracts (so all parties know what is the service functionality and the related support)
2. Checklists for Help Desks (Should be well established I suppose, but I dont have a list myself)
3. Checklists for Incident Response
4. Checklist for Root Cause Analysis (I like the list developed by Lenny Rachitsky at http://www.transparentuptime.com/)
5. Checklist for Change Management (i.e. Risk analysis and scheduling)
6. Checklist for SLA reporting (i.e. how do you prove you are meeting obligations)

[Jared Pfost]

Checklists are great for repeatability, especially for operational processes. For service oriented processes e.g. security requirements for new projects or application security, checklists can lull the busy or inexperienced to miss areas not on the list. I always framed checklists as defining the foundation only. The last step should be to identify additional areas not written down. This is also a great way to improve the checklist going forward. I don't have the stats in front of me but many companies who suffer security incidents are check-list compliant. I guess another way to say it is checklists are great for consistency but lousy for process effectiveness.

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