The Mighty Checklist: Redux

Back in October, I entered a blog about the power of checklists. And just the other day, my colleague Frank Miller entered a post on checklists referencing a recent New York Times article on the topic.

Paul Ritchie, on his wonderful Crossderry blog (an HR World Top 100 Blog site) was kind enough to highlight the October PMThink post and offer his thoughts.

A few days ago, Ritchie added another post that showed some excellent examples of checklists in action, including an excerpt from a New Yorker article on the use of checklists in the medical field.

Try this on for size: A single checklist implemented at Johns Hopkins Hospital had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

Here's the post. I suggest reading the whole article...

http://crossderry.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/still-looking-down-in-checklists/

Leverage Checklists for Success

Whether you are a project manager or surgeon, don't hesitate to take advantage of the simple checklist to improve the quality of your actions. Recycle appropriate project lessons-learned into your checklist to keep it evergreen. ...

... "But a year after surgical teams at eight hospitals adopted a 19-item checklist, the average patient death rate fell more than 40 percent and the rate of complications fell by about a third, the researchers reported. " ...

Via NYTimes: Simple Checklist

UPDATE: Cool and recent reference post on checklists via ProductiveWise.