[3amOpsGuy]

It's kinda cliched for someone with a username containing "ops" to come out and say "i love checklists", but i do!

I've never found a better tool for communicating what to do and in what order. Everyone just understands them, with zero training. You can even play with the format slightly and people still get it, e.g. break out a formal time column? Sure! People just start using it.

I especially like them for high pressure situations. E.g. for handling prod outages i've consistently found checklists work better in practice than flow charts, knowledge bases, call trees... etc.

I use them for many things, from the fairly benign (releases?) to the relatively rare (new joiners).

I recommend, just based on my experiences so may not apply in all environments, using a simple web based app to handle all your check lists. It'll be accessible from any device, without installing anything up front.

A couple of small extra features will make it infinitely more useful:

1) Allow for both a "ticked" / done status and a "working on" / "i've grabbed this one" status. Display the user who's grabbed it and the time they grabbed it.

2) Allow for checklists to have all their boxes reset on a schedule, e.g. daily reset of the "start of day" check list.

3) Archive completed checklists - they capture useful information about who and when, so I don't bin them when they're completed

[lasonrisa]

Can you recommend any those web tools please?

[MortenK]

A checklist can be as simple as an spread sheet, so you could use:

-A shared network- or Dropbox folder containing Excel sheets

-A google docs account with check list spreadsheets

-Smartsheet.com

-Any wiki software, self-hosted or managed, i.e. wikidot etc.

-Any of the myriad of todo-list apps, just be sure the todo-lists (actually checklists) can be re-used as templates.

[kubaf]

great insights, thanks for sharing!