Over the years of keeping this checklist, I’ve noticed something else: that the process of creating and executing the checklist causes things to come to mind that need to be in it (or removed from it). The power of a master checklist to solve this has been amazing. Overnight air travel involves several “point of no return” milestones because at a certain point you no longer have available time to double back to your home to grab an item and later, you can no longer double back to your vehicle to grab something either. Since I have a busy mind, the possibility of forgetting to bring something was very real and caused a lot of stress. I have had periods in my career where overnight air travel was frequent. If that work is done in a repeating cycle, we have all the more motivation to be rid of and to quality ensure it by giving the work to machines that don’t experience mental drift due to tedium. We want to be relieved of the tedium of precise, ensured execution of extremely detailed, order-sensitive steps. Process-oriented computer work has its roots in work done by humans. Think of them as build, deployment or testing steps. The real focus here is operational checklists for the success of software (although we’ll discuss a lot about checklists in general). While a true commitment to the “everything in Git” principle would encourage the storage of checklists that humans perform in Git, there are some much deeper connections between the human code and the computer code that eventually automates these procedures. However, most of the time we secretly limit that “everything” to “everything the computer performs” and leave out the things that humans do to ensure the integrity of the software. In fact, Git ultimately serves as the single source of truth. GitOps is a commitment to ensure everything needed for success in building and operating software is stored in Git. Checklists literally save lives in many high stakes circumstances like flying airplanes and performing surgery. The book “The Checklist Manifesto” paints a picture of how checklist usage creates a dramatic impact on quality outcomes by achieving consistency in meticulous and repetitive human-performed tasks. So what would the equivalent be in the human realm? How about a detailed set of ordered steps that must be completed to achieve a desired result? That seems like an apt description of procedural checklists. Computers are very good at this meticulous duty and perform instructions flawlessly many times over. We are all familiar with the concept of a computer executing code - it takes a structured instructions and executes them in order to produce a desired end result. There is one type of human knowledge that is more like computer code than anything else: and that is process execution knowledge. It is easy to think of code as only a computer thing, but in truth, humans have been codifying all kinds of knowledge for centuries.
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