Depending on your line of work, as an individual contributor, you may have a huge number of tasks to perform, or you may have just one. In most office settings, there’s always lots of work to be done, and more than anyone can possibly remember all the time.

This problem will only compound as you move into leadership. Managers have to have visibility into what everyone on the team is doing in addition to their priorities.

Checklist vs process

Checklist

The checklist can be a list of work to be done, or the necessary steps in completing an individual piece of work.

Most project management software (eg. Jira, monday.com, etc.) will allow you to build checklists of what needs to be done. Admittedly these are more packed with detail than the checklists I’ll discuss later, but they fulfill a similar purpose in an office setting. These checklists cover what needs to be done, and can provide some context for why the work needs to be done.

Checklists of necessary steps cover how the work needs to be done. The checklist ensures that every necessary step is followed in order to complete the work without common errors.

Process

The process, like the checklist of steps is how we do something. The added benefit of the process is that it tells you why the work is done that way. A good process should have some historical context, explain some of the dependencies of the work, and explain any other relevant information for why the decisions have been made this way.

Why we do both

On our team we do both checklists and processes for basically everything. When we develop a new process, we start by building the process. We’ll explain how the specific work needs to be done, and clarify additional context for why we’ve decided to do it that way. We find that by adding the additional context to processes, it helps train new team members and makes it more memorable. Instead of just memorizing instructions, team members can fully understand why we do it that way. By understanding the why, we can build Active Commitment on our team rather than just training people to do it that way because we said so.

The other benefit of a process with context, is that new team members can critique the process better. Fresh eyes always catch something we missed, and help to improve our processes.

Context in our processes is also helpful for stakeholder management. When we work with other teams, they may ask us to make additions to processes, or see if we can remove a few steps temporarily in order to meet a deadline for a feature. With the context, we can come to these conversations with everything we need to know in order to clarify what the impacts could be on other related work beyond what our team and the stakeholder are discussing. That doesn’t mean we always get our way, it can mean that we have enough information to realize that the stakeholder makes a great point and we can do it their way permanently, or temporarily because we know how to go back and fill gaps later.

Finally, a well defined process keeps things open for auditing in the future. We know why the work is done that way, so we can continually ask if it’s still important, if it still makes sense to do it that way, if something else has replaced this process, or if new technology or capabilities in the organization enables changes to the process for greater efficiency.

Finally, the checklists make it easier to quickly follow the critical steps in the process without being bogged down in the why every time you perform an action.

The types of checklists

If your process is ready to be refined to an easy to follow checklist, you should consider what type of checklist you want to follow. There are 2 main types of checklist.

Confirm-do

The confirm-do checklist is best where a process needs to be followed in a specific order. To take some extreme examples, bomb defusal or landing a plane. In these cases, skipping a step or doing something out of order could be catastrophic, so it’s best for the checklist to be confirm-do. You read each step or receive your instructions one step at a time, do the step, check the box, and then move on to the next one.

Do-confirm

The do-confirm checklist is best where the order of steps isn’t that important. Consider something like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. It doesn’t really matter what order they go on the tree, you can just do it, and confirm at the end that all your boxes of ornaments are empty so that you know you’ve completed the task.

Wrapping Up

Now that you understand the difference between a do-confirm checklist, a confirm-do checklist, and a full process, you can determine where each one is more appropriate.

Remember that for new tasks, it’s best to work through building a checklist before you formalize a whole process. Building checklists first ensures that your team is able to execute on the work faster, before they invest the time in recording the whole process for future team members.