Locality Switch

I would hate to be a surgeon – there’s so much stuff to remember! Do one thing wrong, and you could kill somebody. That’s a field of work I could never pursue. The World Health Organization announced last year that they are introducing checklists to make sure surgeons don’t miss anything out:

A WHO initiative to encourage surgeons across the world to use checklists when they operate on patients was launched last month.

[From WHO: Checklists Save Lives]

Brilliant! It’s so simple, but so brilliant.

We could do with more checklists in every occupation, not just the medical profession. Mechanics, librarians, council planners, plumbers, electricians, programmers, etc.

Web-based software firm 37signals has demonstrated their checklist for deploying new updates. If it is good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

Checklists are great, but they only help when you use them.

Yesterday, I was debugging a WordPress plugin which wasn’t working with the Cutline theme. The plugin seemed to be configured fine, and worked perfectly on every other theme we tried, but not this particular one. Why? After some poking around in the plugins files, I discovered that the plugin was set to run when the template’s footer loaded. That’s nice – our footer was loading, wasn’t it?

Well, sort of. The footer was loading, but it was not telling the WordPress engine when it was loading. A simple addition of <?php wp_footer(); ?> to the footer file seemed to sort the issue out! Simple. How could this have been missed out of the theme? If there was a WordPress theme checklist, then this could have been avoided.

But wait – there IS a WordPress theme checklist! It’s a shame the Cutline theme developer didn’t follow the checklist. A small oversight, I’m sure. It’s an easy mistake to of made (hey, even I didn’t know this checklist existed until recently).

I’ve since emailed a fix to the developer, so let’s hope they get it and can release a fix – all in the name of good software.

This has got me thinking, how could I reduce errors at my radio station if I had checklists? Here’s a checklist I just made which could be run through every time I finish work on a studio:

• Do all mics work?
• Does the on air light activate and deactivate when the mics are in use?
• Does the console send an output to the DAs?
• Does the on-air switcher still activate the studio?
• Do the CD players load CDs, trigger from the console, and play through the correct fader?
• Do all computers log on to the network, load the correct software and play audio to the console?
• Do the telephones function?
• Are the studio monitors functioning?
• Is everything in phase?
• Do all headphones function?

This should be second nature to every technician, but it can’t hurt to have a checklist for this stuff. Here’s another place a checklist could save dramas: new sponsorships

• Does the sponsor have an agreement filled out?
• Has the agreement been approved by management?
• Has the money been received in the station’s bank account?
• Has the copy for the ad been approved by station management?
• Does finished recoding sound audible through studio monitors and cheap mono speakers?
• Does the finished track have the end date embedded in the ID3 tags for automatic deletion?
• Is the client happy with their track?
• Has the finished track been added to the correct folders?

This one is a bit more complex becasue it required multiple people to fill it out, but in essence it’s still simple and could save trouble later down the track.  If checklists are helping the medical profession, wouldn’t they help us?