Checklist for use in an organisation prior to running a fiddly task

October 17, 2024 6:41 AM

In my organisation we frequently have to run fiddly batches which are fraught with potential errors - one step forgotten and it's a world of trouble. I am looking for a web app or (likely) Microsoft desktop software that we could use to create template checklists for common processes/tasks that we 'tick off' (like a pre flight checklist) prior to running the (for example) batch. These should be easily sharable and updatable by the whole team if possible and we should ideally be able to re-use them time after time

For added win we could do an informal 'sign off' where the date and project name is saved somewhere for each checklist?

Any ideas?

Thanks!!

posted by dance to Work & Money (7 answers total)

Possible Microsoft forms? I believe you can have shared forms that multiple people can edit the questions, and the results can be accessed as an excel file.
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:02 AM on October 17, 2024

Microsoft Planner is perfect for checklists.
posted by seemoorglass at 7:07 AM on October 17, 2024

My wife’s org uses smartsheet for this sort of thing. Smartsheet has some really smart (sorry) process automation stuff, good permissions control (e.g. who can view, who can edit), and logging of who changed what. Some of the notifications could be a bit more granular for her tastes, so there’s some stuff that would be more useful if it were triggered on a status change that is instead set up as a scheduled job that runs once a day (imagine that Alice should be notified when Bob has completed a particular task, but instead the job notifies Alice the next morning of all the items that now have the right pending status because Bob did his stuff the previous day). It’s not a deal breaker, it’s just not quite as responsive as they’d like.

Note that a lot of the stuff they use it for could probably be done in Excel but for the lack of an obvious way to make Excel do what they want, and now they’re pretty locked into the smartsheet way of doing things. I suspect if Excel’s documentation had been a little clearer about the sorts of things they were trying to do, they’d never have gone shopping for something better.
posted by fedward at 7:55 AM on October 17, 2024

A shared OneNote checklist? (I hate OneNote, but it does realtime collaboration pretty well over multiple platforms. And has checkboxes.)
posted by lhauser at 12:46 PM on October 17, 2024

Notion probably has all the features you need for creating checklist templates and, if you want, maintaining a database that records when tasks are completed or by whom. There is a learning curve - the platform uses vocabulary like page or template or database in a way that I sometimes find confusing, but they have a good video tutorial series, the Notion Academy, and there are many free or purchasable templates created by the user community.
posted by zepheria at 12:58 PM on October 17, 2024

Wrike can do this, you can install it on a desktop, mobile or just a web browser. It lets you set up templates, and you can assign tasks to people in a variety of ways. it can track who completed a task.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 8:03 PM on October 17, 2024

What else do you want from this process? Tools like Wiki's (Wikimedia, ikiwiki, Atlassian Confluence) show a history of who's made which changes, both good for updating a checklist and for archiving copies in case they're later audited or you bring a 'what did we learn this time?' kind of continuous improvement activity.

There's a stretch goal you might try for embedding this in your organisation: run a book group using Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto. It makes its point well and with a number of strong examples that everyone gains from moving the mental load of doing preparation to confirming you're ready, plus you build a habit of doing most of the necessary things and that extra brain capacity can help deal with the unexpected things that crop up.

If that first book club succeeds, there's Dave Snowden's Cynefin, which explains how a checklist turns implicit but widely-held knowledge into explicit acknowledgement of complications (and affords you space to work on good practices with your colleagues as experts in your business process). It also offers tools for navigating situations that are complex (an area where there is structure but the inter-relationships have to be discovered and rediscovered) or chaotic (no clear structure to anything or how they interact). You'll be Six Sigma continuous improvement black belts in no time!
posted by k3ninho at 3:11 AM on October 18, 2024 [1 favorite]