Checklists 4.0
posted 2017.08.20 by Clark Wilkins, Simplexable

Checklists were introduced in the first release of insight16 in late 2015. Since then, we've been revising the concept, and today we released the fourth major iteration of the list tool in v16.127. I'd like to highlight some points here about what it does and why it matters.

Checklists are organized in three parts:

  • Metadata describing the checklist as a whole.
  • Major steps on the checklist which act as organization of groups of tasks.
  • Specific tasks within each group.

A checklist is setup within the editor. First, you create the metadata which includes:

name
The checklist name
list type
Lists are grouped by types that you define. This is purely for organizational purposes.
attachments
A list can be attached to a job and/or customer. When it's attached to a job, it shows up in that job's views.1

Next you add one or more steps, in desired order, to be used as task groups.

Finally, you add tasks to each of the steps2 and you end up with a working checklist template like this one — which we use when building TripWire servers.

When we build a new server, we take an existing checklist of the desired type and duplicate it. The name is changed and connected to the new job, and then we +use it which looks like this:

To update a task, we roll over it and click.

The task editor loads in an overlay3 where we can edit various aspects of the task itself.

As the tasks are completed, the checklist will update. When all tasks are green, the checklist can be saved and deactivated.

There are more aspects to checklists such as vendor punchlists, task prioritization4, and view filtering.4 A quick read of the help will show you what's new in checklists4.0. The tool is very flexible and mobile-device friendly, and it helps you to get consistent and complete results for your business processes, so please use it to make your own task lists more organized.

  1. Views are used to separate various aspects of a job. One of them is a list of all checklists connected to a job.
  2. In this example, we wanted the tasks to sort in a specific order, not just alphabetically, so each is prepended with a number (1, 2, ...).
  3. The overlay is a mid-2017 change in insight. As used here, it dramatically speeds up the workflow. As you make changes, the master view is updated behind the scenes, so it's current the moment you close the overlay.
  4. New in checklists 4.0 (v16.127).