Organizations, to turn their future for good rely on big decisions. However, more often it’s the small decisions that matter the most.

Nearly 100,000 U.S. patients are killed every year by the failure of doctors & staff to follow simple instructions. Really! Hospital-acquired infections kill that many people every year, and nearly all those deaths are entirely preventable.

An important way of attacking such errors is to use a checklist. What’s new in this approach? Good question. Though the approach is very old but how we customize and use it, is something that makes the difference. As per a meaningful quote, “The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely or reliably”. Every aspect requires a check.

In sync with the above example, we consider our client as our patients who have shown trust by approaching us in their difficult hour. We take it more than our duty to get them out from that problematic situation no matter how much efforts we have to put in.

Another thing which keeps lurking from the corner to hurt your solutions/deliverable is the curse of knowledge. One may tend to deliver the best but unintentionally can end up missing many links that have dire consequences.

To mitigate both situations and many like these, a tailored project process is required which can be made superior by a strong checklist. It should be further enhanced and refined at regular intervals to deliver best solutions.

The checklist that we made to keep discussed scenario in bay is based on below ideology:

1. To include all “stupid but critical” tasks so they are not overlooked;
2. Making it mandatory for team members to inform others when a concerned task on the list is over;
3. Empower team members to question superiors about the checklist;
4. Allow for improvisation in unusual circumstances;
5. Thoroughly think and test checklist before implementing it.

Though the process checklist is comprehensive in its structure, it is just a benchmark or the primary level. Excellence output checks are beyond any limit. It looked a simple task in the beginning but as we proceeded with the whole idea, it has now taken a shape of an exhaustive module which has become a software in itself.

A special department (we call it Concept Hacking Team) takes the onus of this work which not only checks but tries to dig out what might have gotten skipped while a project was executed. Our clients may never get to know that after how many checks a deliverable reaches them, well that is even not the intent, and the only thing we want is that our client should fall in love with what we deliver.

Bonus: We have shared one of our exemplary checklists. You too can leverage it by downloading it from here:

Authored by: Shikhar Sahni, Group Manager, Operations and Abhishek Bhatia, Team Lead, Concept Hacking