Verify your work with checklists
If a checklist so simple can save so many lives, I thought the technique could surely help us do better as well. So after reading about this study and their checklist, I’ve been pushing us to create checklists for all the common procedures at 37signals.
We now have checklists in Backpack for confirming that a feature is complete, we have a checklist for preparing the feature for deployment and for executing the deployment, and finally for verifying that the feature is working as expected in the wild.
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It’s the kind of stuff that we all know, but that we’ll often forget if we’re not being reminded about it in the moment. Thinking back to the mistakes we’ve made in the past, there are plenty of those that could have been avoided or caught much earlier if we had been using checklists.
This is a great reminder of two things: using checklists and adopting good ideas. Checklists are a simple and effective quality management tool. We use them for our software development (I have been a bit slow at getting them in place but we have been making progress recently). Also this shows how management improvement should work. You get good ideas from others and adapt them for use in your systems. Copying what others do, doesn’t work well. But understanding the concepts they use to improve performance and then adapting those concepts to your organization is the path to improved performance.
Related: Checklists Save Lives – Find Joy and Success in Business – Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – The Power of a Checklist – Most Meetings are Muda
Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay
I continue to do my part to publicize the abusive CEO pay packages that the current crop of unethical CEO’s, and those sitting on corporate boards have supported (Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 – 2007 post on CEO pay abuses). It does seem there is more anger now at the looting these corrupt CEOs have engaged in; though far too many people seem to think the corruption is some isolated few CEO’s. The widespread failure of ethical standards by an enormous number CEO’s (those taking from corporate treasuries as though it was their own personal bank account) is the problem (not a few individuals). The looters certainly have littered their “courts” with apologists for their egregious behavior. Even with the large amounts they pay such lackeys I am surprised they find such willing apologists, in such large numbers.
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This executive pay data is for 2008, from the New York Times article, Pay at the Top. Earnings and employee data for 2008 from Google Finance. I would not pay any of these guys 1% of what they were paid if I owned the company, myself.
These guys and their friends have created a culture where their looting is as accepted as the clothes the emperor is not wearing. We need to wake up and stop letting these people steal the bounty created by the employees, customers, community, suppliers, investors… They want a world where they can behave like nobility – taking whatever they want from the value created by others. And lately they have succeeded in creating such a world. They leave in their wake very weakened companies and societies.
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