[wpietri]

For those skeptical of checklists as a symptom of bureaucracy, I wanted to suggest a distinction between top-down (or controlling) bureaucracy and bottom-up (or supportive) bureaucracy.

For the first 10 years or so of my working life, my only experience of paperwork was top-down controlling bullshit. Pointless timesheets. Useless reports. Data collected and never looked at again. It was managers imposing mandates in ways that rarely helped the business, and often hurt it.

But in getting into the Lean movement, I came to realize there's another approach. If you are a team that wants to do well, there's only so far you can go on implicit work practices. Eventually variation becomes the biggest barrier to improvement. The solution is to collaboratively create a standard way of getting a job done. With variation minimized, you can then start to rigorously test improvements, increasing quality and reducing waste.

This is easiest to see when you're working solo. A while back I was struggling to go running in the mornings. I was always forgetting something: keys, money, headphones. Now near the door is a simple list I can run down to make sure I have everything. Less stress, less wasted time in the mornings, more runs. I love it.

But groups can do the same thing. Can and should, really. Top-down imposition of quality practices rarely works. The people doing the work are the best ones to create and tune the way a job gets done. Might as well do it before some manager gets a bright idea and inflicts the wrong approach on you.