Checklists With Teeth — How to Stop Skipping the Important Steps
A checklist nobody enforces is a wish list. Here's how to make process steps blocking — so the wrong outcome is harder than the right one.
If the right thing is harder than the wrong thing, you'll get the wrong thing.
Every incident post-mortem ends with 'we should have followed the checklist'. The checklist exists — somewhere — in a Notion doc nobody opens. The fix isn't a better checklist. The fix is making the workflow itself the checklist.
Mandatory items block transitions
When a Tellzm process template has a mandatory checklist on a stage, the stage advance button is grayed out until the boxes are ticked. The right thing is no harder than the wrong thing — the wrong thing is literally not clickable.
What to put on a mandatory list
- Anything where skipping causes a P0. Security review, financial sign-off, accessibility check.
- Anything legal or compliance touches. Skipping these doesn't just hurt the project — it hurts the company.
- Anything you've forgotten before. The post-mortem item becomes a checklist item. Don't be embarrassed by the list — be glad it's not your memory.
What NOT to put on the list
Don't mark every step as mandatory. The point of mandatory is *signal*. If everything is mandatory, nothing is. Be ruthless about which items are real blockers — 5 mandatory items in a 30-step process is about right.
Documentation can't enforce. Workflows can.Open the demo's process library and start an instance with a real mandatory checklist.
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