Today I turn our project management book review lens to The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. As an aspiring project manager, you’re faced with at least two major tasks. The first is the most obvious: you want to learn everything you can about project management. The second task is less obvious but no less important: you want to understand how to articulate the need for process, and the absolutely critical role that it plays in getting work done effectively. This book will help with both.
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The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande
The tagline of this book is “How to Get Things Right”, but I would almost say that Dr. Gawande (who is a surgeon) does his work most effectively here by writing a book that could easily be subtitled “The Consequences of Getting Things Wrong“. Which, of course, makes for an especially compelling read for anyone occasionally in the position of needing to explain the importance of project management work to colleagues, supervisors, stakeholders, or others (spoiler alert: this is basically every project manager, ever, at at least some point in their career).
What Is This Book About?
The basic premise of The Checklist Manifesto is that as work becomes increasingly complicated, it becomes increasingly difficult to “autopilot” all the small steps that make up an important task — and impossible to do so correctly all the time. Dr. Gawande is a surgeon, so many of his examples are from medical situations, but there are also many examples from fields like construction, disaster management (the below quote is from a section recapping the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005), and aviation: all fields that have become incredibly complex.
Dr. Gawande’s idea here is that our brains can only hold so many things; we aren’t “practicing at the top of our license” (to borrow a phrase from medicine) or upholding our “highest and best use” (to borrow one from my own more familiar field of social impact) when we expend our energy on routine tasks that need to be replicated correctly every single time without fail. Checklists allow us to build this foundation, rely on its perfect execution, and then spend our valuable brain space solving problems that a checklist can’t address — now with the added knowledge that said foundation was executed properly.
Who Should Read This Book?
This is really a book that focuses on the “process management” part of project management. As a result, I think there are two main types of people who should read this. First, of course, would be anyone whose job entails a lot of process creation or management. If you’re interviewing for a job like this, you should put this book on your to-read list right now and do everything you can to finish it before your interview.
The second type of person is a new or aspiring project manager with an intuitive understanding of why management and process is important, but who falters a bit when asked (especially by a skeptic) to explain why it matters. This book gives so, so many vivid examples of exactly what happens when we don’t get process right (often, critical failure) and what happens when we do get it right. (Best-case scenario: everything goes perfectly; worst-case scenario, something totally unexpected and unforeseeable happens and we’re able to respond quickly and effectively because we have the basics covered.)
In both cases, this book helps us internalize, articulate, and then communicate outward the value of our work.
There’s also an appendix with several example checklists and one “Checklist for Checklists”. I found this latter checklist so helpful that I took a scan of it and saved it for my own use.
Who Might Put This On Their “Save For Later” List?
Similarly, there are two types of people that I think can skip this.
The first type of person is someone who’s looking for hard technical skills, rather than immediately-actionable comm points. (Maybe try Risk Up Front if this is you!) For example, I don’t think the Checklist Manifesto is a book I’ll reach for in the future when I’m right in the middle of something and thinking, OK, wait, how did he say to do it? (In contrast, I’m reading Made to Stick right now and I already know that I’m going to grab it over and over again to reference specific methods it outlines long after I’ve finished it.)
The second type of person is someone who’s medically squeamish (Dr. Gawande is a surgeon so a lot of his examples are surgical) or very sensitive (many of these examples are very high-stakes; bad situations here involve airplane failure, not just loss of dollars on a balance-sheet).
The Bottom Line
I think this is required reading for anyone in process-heavy roles, and I think this is highly-encouraged reading for anyone who often finds themselves in situations where they need to explain why management work is important. If you do read it, definitely take a picture of the Checklist for Checklists in the back!
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