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Atul Gawande wrote the Checklist Manifesto (http://gawande.com/the-checklist-manifesto) which goes into a lot more detail about all this. I would thoroughly recommend reading it if you want to improve how you get stuff done.


It's a fantastic book that literally changed my life. I've incorporated checklists deeply into my workflows, to the extent that when I start a new project, the first thing I do is generate a checklist to work against. The number of casual errors, oversights and other preventable errors I make has dropped precipitously. Call it Checklist-Driven-Development (CDD).


The checklist for checklists seems like gold for making certain a group of people are on the same page when making checklist items.

http://www.projectcheck.org/checklist-for-checklists.html


From that same site [1], you can see a collection of checklists [1], one of which is the actual checklist that Pronovost created at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

[1] http://www.projectcheck.org/checklists.html


I second-thirded-n'ed this recommendation...the closing chapter in which Gawande describes how a checklist prevented a patient from dying on him in surgery is just gripping.

There's also excellent sections on construction...such as how project managers make and disseminate decisions at a breakneck pace in skyscraper construction.


+1 for the Checklist Manifesto. Gawande is an excellent writer. I liked his other books, particularly Complications (http://gawande.com/complications).




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