We are in the hospitality business with a hotel chain. We have Confluence and Jira in the Atlassian Cloud. We‘d like to understand the benefits of using a checklist software in our organization better.
Can you list some advantages that you see?
We have actually had this discussion with a customer who runs a hotel chain. This is the list of arguments that resulted:
- The hotel business involves a lot of non-digital work like cleaning rooms, preparing and serving food, and dealing with hotel guests. None of such core activities can be a fully digital process.
- Yet all these processes need management. Managing often needs counting, numbers and status requests. Fitting real-world processes into digital containers can be a good first step to getting numbers and actual status reliably.
- Digital checklists offer a great way to keep track of the regular execution of a set of predefined tasks since every processing cycle is automatically stored in the database.
- Checklists offer real value to their users. They come in two variants: Read-Do or Do-Confirm. While the first reading and then doing (aka Read-Do) is suitable for mission-critical processes like flights or hospital operations, a hotel will most often employ Do-Confirm checklists where the checklist is more a reminder not to forget anything.
- Make no mistakes: Checklists do not teach. It’s a given that people either read the links (e.g. to wiki pages or videos) or better already know the process.
- Checklists are refined regularly to meet the needs of staff working with them. Good checklists help staff to suggest improvements. And good checklist managers use this feedback to make the lists as short and practical as possible.
- Checklists improve the quality of processes because they make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
- Checklists support onboarding of new employees by providing a clear guideline for satisfactory execution of a multi-step task.*
- Checklists also make sure that the essential requirements of a task or customer interaction are fulfilled.
- Checklists give peace of mind to staff for knowing what a good performance is and to managers for knowing that essentials are met.
- Our checklist solution can be tried swiftly with minimal costs. If they don’t work and are not used it’s easy to drop out again. If they are used, the money saved by errors prevented will outweigh the running costs by far.
- Checklists offer a simple way to plan and track repetitive tasks and make it simple for hotel managers and Head Office employees in management positions to see which tasks have been fulfilled, will be fulfilled soon or have not been taken care of.
- Digital checklists provide a good alternative to paper-based lists which could disappear in wrong folders, paper piles, or fall behind desks. Paper-based lists need to be printed, stapled, hole-punched filled out, and filed in folders. Digital checklists will save work time by reducing the number of tasks to the fill-out process only. They will also save office space and paper over the years.
- Digital checklists offer broader options such as tailoring to each hotel (e.g. hotel with/without a bar, certain heating systems, special equipment, and services, etc.)
- Digital checklists offer the ability to be connected to other systems e.g. ticket/task management solutions or PMS (Property Management System, the core system to manage hotel rooms, payment, and hotel services).
We’re working on a solution that has helped hotels with checklists (on the Atlassian Marketplace).