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Lifesavers and Timesavers: Checklists and templates can help!

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Category: Articles by Members
Written by Dr. Larry Rowland, PMP

 

PMI Breakfast Roundtable - Checklists and Templates  

Held on: July 13, 2011

Facilitator: Dr. Larry Rowland, PMP

 

Checklists and templates were the topic of discussion at the July 13th PMI breakfast roundtable. Here are some of the highlights.

 

Checklists were defined as a list of items to be noted, checked, or remembered. Some basic concepts and best practices for checklists were reviewed. They came from The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right, by Atul Gawande (2009). Here’s the main issues:

 

Checklists remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

 

Checklists provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us – flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.

 

Bad checklists are vague and imprecise.

They are to long; they are hard to use; they are impractical.

They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step.

They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.

 

Good checklists are precise.

They are efficient and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.

They provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss.

Good checklists are practical.

 

The power of checklists is limited.

They can help experts remember how to mange a complex process.

They can make priorities clearer and prompt people to function better as a team.

By themselves, however, checklists cannot make anyone follow them.

 

People turn to checklists for two reasons.

First, they are trained to do so.

Second, the checklists have proved their worth – they work.

 

You must define a clear pause point.

Choose DO-CONFIRM (do the work, then confirm compliance) or READ-DO (read the checklist item by item, then do each task item by item).

Keep the checklist to between five and nine items or whatever.

The wording should be simple and exact.

The checklist should fit on one page.

 

Templates were defined as a document or file having a preset format, used as a starting point for a particular application so that the format does not have to be recreated each time it is used.

Templates offer three significant advantages. First, they are general and reusable. Second, templates exploit the expertise of two distinct groups – the creators of the template and the users who add value. Third, templates are not project specific.    (Adapted from Dongarra, 1995, http://http://netlib.org/linalg/html_templates/node7.html)

 

Jamie Champagne, Kim Huntzinger, Kuuipo Lamatia, and Robert Nievera from Bank of Hawaii showed off their project management templates and process diagrams. Nani Chang brought along her templates also. Examples of a requirements questionnaire checklist and a PERT estimated duration template from Ken Smith’s “Performance Evaluation Tool Kit” were distributed. Ken was not able to attend, but the tool kit stood in for him. Larry Rowland distributed a charter template and made available templates for a plan, status report, and evaluation report upon request.

 

We all agreed, checklists and templates are not just dumbed down to-do lists. They represent a thoughtful collection of the most critical and important steps in a process. Additionally, we enjoyed the insight that both the creator of the template and the user are adding value and expertise.

 

Other valued sources that were available at the roundtable included:

 

Stackpole, C., 2009. A project manager’s book of forms: A companion to the PMBOK Guide – fourth edition. Wiley/PMI.

Levin, G., & Green, A.R., 2010. Implementing program management: Templates and forms aligned with the Standard for Program Management – 2nd edition. CRC Press.

 

Internet sources (this is just a few):