Checklist: Simple Business Process Improvement Tool

There is one superior way to make our work at home and in the office simplified and easy and that is with the use of a checklist. No matter what your job is, or whatever tasks you do at home; a checklist is an important tool useful in checking what needs to be done or what things are lacking to complete certain tasks. Aside from finalizing your what-to-do lists, it can also be utilized as a daily reminder of appointments, errands to do, schedule of events, and where problems encountered can be noted. Here are some other ways to use checklists in your business.

The checklist is equally useful when you have a business enterprise of your own. When you allow everyone in the workplace to practice making use of a checklist all the time, from the employees of the maintenance department to the supervisory managers; the need for supervision and delegation of duties is lessened.

What the head of the department is required to do is just to train the people under him to orient and teach them on the use of the checklist and what follows is to leave them on their own as they are already aware of their duties by just following the checklist, and ticking down items that were completed; job operation will be performed as smooth as possible and will be done without a hitch.

Checklists are very useful especially when the job at hand is complex and needs to be broken down into simpler tasks. The various tasks are checked occasionally by the supervisor to see what has been accomplished and the remaining things that still need to be done. When every department in the business enterprise is utilizing checklists, every section and department of the business operation will run smoothly as it helps in making the tasks easier, organized and on time.

There are a lot of business operations that get improved by the usage of checklists, like the tasks performed by an accountant. The routine and obvious tasks that are always done such as switching or turning on the computer should not be listed anymore (or use a specialized checklist/task management software with recurring task feature for them).

Important tasks like evaluating transactions, checking invoices, balancing accounts and counting cash should be listed. These tasks are very important especially when someone in the department is not going to turn in, so that the use of the checklist for the tasks assigned to him will readily be delegated to another or equally distributed to all the others in the same department. The checklist can easily be referred to in tracking information, noting additional documents, where filed and kept.

Checklist can be made by starting on the daily tasks, then create separate lists for weekly, monthly, quarterly and the once a year tasks. How satisfying it is completing all the assigned tasks for the day as you check all the things that were accomplished and taking down notes for those that needs to be revised to make production with the business more efficient.