Checklists: Saving Lives, Winning Wars. What Can’t They Do?
The New Yorker had a great article last year titled The Checklist. It describes how organizations ranging from hospitals to the air force have effectively used simple checklists to solve major problems. Hospitals use them to enforce the steps for safely putting a line in a patient and avoiding infections. The air force used a preflight checklist to get thousands of Boeing B-17’s off the ground during World War II.
At its essence, a checklist helps a user follow the best practices for either a complex or a mundane activity by making explicit “the minimum, expected steps.” Ativiti is attempting to build off of this same insight by helping experts distill the knowledge they’ve acquired into actionable steps.
The checklist above got us thinking - what is the ideal action to put in Ativiti? Do we expect our users to check off when they wash their hands? Probably not (though when they do, we know we’ve hit the big time!). Jack Cheng’s post on Time on your side has a great heuristic to use: any task that will take between 5 and 60 minutes is a great candidate for tracking in your personal task list or putting in an expert guide for others to follow. Anything shorter, and the cost of capturing it isn’t worth it; longer, and you probably haven’t done a good enough job of breaking it into actionable steps.
Getting The Most Value out of Conferences
A few weeks ago, a colleague only a couple years younger than I am, approached me and asked me if I had any conference networking tips to share. He was going to his first professional conference. His questions were straight forward:
- How can I get the most value out of networking?
- How many of the 400 presentations should I try to attend?
- Which ones?
I was a bit surprised that he was asking me. I remember asking the same questions to a senior VP six months earlier, before my first conference. I’d been to three more in the meantime, which apparently makes me worth asking. So I did the only thing I felt ethically appropriate; I tried to repeat the senior VP’s answers as best I could remember them:
The SVP’s advice worked out for me. I weaved my way through the ranks of business intelligence professionals: I met leading software developers, I was invited to join a leading B.I. influence council, and I quickly learned which sales reps were value-adding, and which were simply reps.
Next Generation Guidance
Was my ability to recount the advice nearly as effective as when I’d heard it from its original source? It seems odd, if conventional, that in 2008 I had to seek the advice of a senior manager on how to prepare for the conference. It was even more odd that my timid colleague thought I was the best person to ask for guidance. Passing on advice through word-of-mouth is so passé, so unfiltered and unreliable.
Shouldn’t this kind of expertise be available with the click of a button, a 1-to-5 crowd sourced rating, and user reviews? The Ativiti model will infuse advice with technology, vetting it by the world, and giving experts a platform to share the wisdom they have with the people who want to consume it.
Action Method
Didn’t I just finish saying there’s a new task/project management app each day? Yesterday, TechCrunch posted about a new project management application called Action Method. I just signed up to check it out, and even though my first instinct is to label them as a “me-too” app, I must say I am pretty impressed with what they’ve built.
They haven’t just dropped a set of features on a page and labeled each with a navigation link, the way another tool I found today has done (check out Pelotonics). Instead, they’ve attempted to create a flexible tool that reflects how we actually work. The primary focus of the app is on “Action Steps” - actual work products. Beyond that, I can dump items into References, Backburners, Discussions, or Events. They’ve also got a “Project View” that unites all of these project items together, and an Activity Feed that shows what everyone has been up to.
The collaboration is extremely smooth. After I type in the name of a task/”Action Step”, I can just start typing in an e-mail address to assign it to someone, even if they haven’t signed up yet. For each new task I create going forward, it attempts to auto-complete for the e-mail addresses I’ve already entered. I can also choose to share all of the activity associated with a project with a specific contact. Kudos to their UI designer(s) for making the whole user experience quick and easy to get started with.