Amazing Checklists

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Governance   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Quality   Risk Management   Schedule Management   Scheduling  

Separated in time by almost three and a half millennia, they share a fundamental simplicity of design--a simplicity so lucid it enables the fault-prone grasp of fleeting, human memory to repeatedly apprehend and regulate complex processes in a systematic and repeatable way. Their characteristic serial structure guides our responses to a succession of tasks or to a flow of information in the way in which we naturally experience them--that is, as one thing occurring after another in a continuous, linear sequence.

And while we may sometimes disparage them as a bureaucratic nuisance--shopping lists on steroids that chain us to the rote performance of repetitively mundane tasks--checklists are a remarkably persistent and versatile solution to the problem of navigating a variety of complex tasks and activities. Historically, the emergence of checklists as a prominent and integral part of managing the quality and efficiency of industrial processes has been driven by successive waves of technological advancement, from the smokestack to the digital era.

Perhaps the most well-known proponent of checklists is the eponymous inspiration for this website: Henry Laurence Gantt, whose Organizing for Work (published nearly 100 years ago) introduced a system of charts for tracking (among other things) the orders for component parts from a specific contractor, as measured against the …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.