A client recently sent me this article about the utilization of checklists as we were going through some discussions on the implementation of a new ITIL-derived change management process.
What I love about it is that it has nothing to do with IT. It's about operating rooms. Yet the lessons still apply - and my client was wise enough to see the correlation. At the end of the day, most of what we do, well, isn't surgery. It can be complex and can be incredibly important and risky for the business, but most of the time it's not life or death. So where we can find lessons from people or organizations who are playing where the stakes are that high, we should look at them carefully and ask ourselves how we might learn something from their challenges and solutions.
My client did just that. If you read the article, though, there is an extremely important piece of information that is easy to miss. The checklist is important - but the real value comes from verbally going through the checklist as a group. It is this interactive and interrogative process that creates the true power of the checklist - and when that step is skipped, the checklist loses its effectiveness.
I think that this is a perfect corollary to the Change Advisory Board (CAB). There has been a lot of push recently to this concept of a "Virtual CAB" - a change authority body that doesn't actually meet, but reviews and approves changes based on a review of the RFC by using some automation tool. Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan of the "Virtual CAB" for minor, low-risk changes. But I believe that their use is becoming too prevalent and organizations, in their zeal for automation, often miss the true point of the CAB - to discuss and evaluate the risk of the change with all stakeholders to ensure that the risk has been adequately quantified, mitigated and accepted. It's tough to do that with a click of a button.
So perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. We should use a checklist to help the CAB ensure that risk has been mitigated and that RFC approval requirements have been met. But to really make it effective, we must require that the CAB does it verbally. Maybe by doing so, we will get that dialogue that supposed to occur and perhaps we will begin to get a more complete understanding of the true impact and risk of proposed changes. And maybe, just maybe, the process will work a little bit better.
Read the article by clicking here and see how you think you might apply it yourself.
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