Early in my career, I worked with a Chief Medical Officer at the Healthcare Software company and what struck me most during my collaboration was his story about 5 Rights – 5 Rights of Medication Administration. It is a general recommendation in the healthcare setting to significantly prevent, reduce medication errors and harm when administrating medicine. The way it works is that you, or family member, or healthcare provider (care team, doctor, nurse, etc.) should always be mindful and apply “5 Rights” by asking 5 simple questions right before administering medicine. You have to ask, “Do I (you) have…”:

• the right patient
• the right drug
• the right dose
• the right route
• and the right time

This simple checklist helps prevent errors, helps reduce waste and unnecessary harm. I’ve shared this checklist with all family members, friends, colleagues, etc. anyone who is going to the hospital, or at the hospital, or going to the doctor to get prescriptions.

This simple art of checklist power further influenced me when I read Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”. Atul brings to life stories that are super simple, common sense, repeatable and that produce outsized results. From preventing hospital acquired infections (a big problem for US Healthcare) by simply using checklists for doctors, nurses to wash their hands before and after seeing patients; to reducing errors and power struggles during surgeries; to preventing and dealing with mid-air aircraft failures using flight manuals and yes simple checklists to rely on.

Including simple repeatable, yet frequently forgotten, steps on a checklist and incorporating checklists into the routines professionals follow, increases adoption of best practices and standardizes best practice adoption.

Over the years, I started documenting and taking notes of my own best practices, checklists, “manuals” to deal with my own practices, inefficiencies and what I’ve seen in the professional life as a lot of wasted processes, a lot “re-created wheels”, time and money wastes, etc. To me, a simple premise was if I did something once, I wanted to document it, distill it into something repeatable in a form of the best practice, checklist. And then come back to it when I have to do it again, repeat it, learn from it and then improve on it, rather than re-creating or re-doing it from scratch.

My intent with these posts is to share what I’ve learned, created and evolved over the past 20+ years working in software development, professional services firms, managing partners & alliances, building business units and practices. My first “Right” was imprinted on me early in my career when our team had a concept for “Make It Right” or “MIR” Funds. Those were intended to make it right for the customers when software development projects went off rails. The goal was to make sure we deliver and go above and beyond to make it…right.

My thinking evolved over time around my own 5 Rights and will continue to evolve.  I use them every day as my “North Star” navigating professional and personal lives. I hope they’ll be of value to you even if you’re not in the industries I mentioned above as I intent to cover a wide range of topics aligned to those Rights that could be applicable to you. Topics around professional, personal productivity and mindfulness; checklists, tips, hacks, lessons learned to help improve efficiency, effectiveness.

My 5 Rights are around the following Principles and Values that I’ll dive deeper in subsequent posts.

• Make It Right – make it right for the customer, focus on the customer success, pain point, experience, satisfaction
• Make It Real – make real products, produce deliverables and real tangible things, make stuff that works
• Make It Repeatable – make it re-usable, iterate, learn, improve what you learned, adjust, and “rinse and repeat”
• Make It Measurable – make it count, focus on outcome, output, “Make it Rain”
• Make It Meaningful – find the why, why is it important, make it in the right frame of mind, make it mindful

On this journey, if we become even 1%, 5%, 10%, etc. better, those saved hours add up to big numbers over the years. For example, 5% of 2,000 typical working hours a year is 100 hours to use for your personal or professional “bank” however you want, that’s 2.5 weeks of mental vacation.

Let’s Make it Happen.