Checklists

Thursday, October 7, 2021 · 2 min read

Checklists are used in critical industries where small mistakes will lead to loss of life. For example, checklists feature heavily in aviation, aerospace engineering, and nuclear power plants.

Other industries can use checklists to elimninate errors in procedural tasks.

Here are some example checklists.

Aviation

• B-17 Pilot’s Checklist, which was the first of the aviation checklists, now standard use in piloting aircraft of all size.
• Checklist for Loading Charge in Little Boy Aboard Enola Gay
• Apollo 11 CSM Operations Checklist flown by Mike Collins with annotations. The original is currently at the National Air and Space Museum. The Apollo missions are full of checklists large and small:
  • Apollo 11 Launch Operations Checklist
  • Apollo 11 CMP Solo Book.
  • Apollo 11 Alternate And Contingency Checklist.
  • Moon walk checklist on Neil Armstrong’s glove cuff
  • Apollo 12 Flight Checklist

Medicine

• World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist (2009)
  • Another example of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist
• Central Line Insertion Care Team Checklist

Technology

• Checklist for Evaluating Emergency Procedures Used in Nuclear Power Plants (1981)
• Xerox Heuristic Evaluation Checklist (1993) is one of the 27 checklists from Making Computers People-Literate by Elaine Weiss.

Misc

• The Tableau Performance Checklist - InterWorks
• Computer Security Checklist
• The pedantic checklist for changing your data model in a web application
• leonar15/startup-checklist: A checklist for incorporation so you can get back to building your product, fundraising, etc.
• Release Checklist - ROOT
• 5S Audit checklist used in lean manufacturing.
• CERN Onboarding Checklist

Research on Checklists

• The implementation of a human factors engineering checklist for human–system interfaces upgrade in nuclear power plants
• An Intervention to Decrease Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections in the ICU (2006)