Your site just went down. Don’t panic. Think. Could be anything, but you need to start somewhere. Check the database? Check DNS? Scratch that, get out a checklist.

Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” has stormed through popular culture leaving a lot of heads spinning in its wake. The premise is all the more enticing for its simplicity – can something as simple as a checklist reduce common errors and let us focus on the important stuff? Mr. Gawande details the use of checklists in the operating room, where they have slashed complications from surgery more than 30% in some hospitals. That impressive track record is bound to draw attention from leaders across many industries. Reading between the lines I found some important lessons to consider before adopting checklists at your workplace:

1. Checklists Must Become Part of Your Routine

If you rely on yourself to remember to use a checklist you probably won’t. You must change your processes so that checklists are fully integrated. Consider adding it into your production deployment scripts so that you have to work through the list before you can push code. Or consider making it part of your daily scrum so that everyone’s on the same page. Whatever the case, however you manage to do it, you can’t rely on human intervention or it’ll fall out of practice.

2. Checklists Really Matter When Mistakes are Very Costly

Before you go checklist crazy make sure a checklist is the right fit for the type of problem you’re trying to solve. It turns out that the value of a checklist is directly tied to how costly the mistakes it prevents are. A pilot who loses lift at thirty thousand feet doesn’t have a lot of time to debug the situation. While not as life-or-death, running through a simple checklist before restoring a backup might go a long way to ensuring that you don’t clobber your user table for good.

3. Checklists Always Involve At Least 2 Parties

A checklist works best when there’s someone reading from the list (e.g. the copilot or the nurse) and someone else performing the checks (e.g. the pilot or the brain surgeon). It’s kind of like Extreme Programming in that way. So you may consider having your QA team be involved in a pre-launch checklist. Or you may have your tech leads involved in a pre-vacation checklist to ensure all work has been handed over cleanly. Whatever the case, splitting up the work between two people helps focus each on his or her role in the process.

So back to your site. Thanks to your finely tuned checklist you’re reminded to check for recent production pushes on a related but separate project. They didn’t mean to do it, but thankfully the checklist helped you recover quickly. Time to go update your unit tests.

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