hardScenarioDesignMidSeniorStaff
The nurses on a ward keep a paper list alongside your system because they do not trust its task list. What has gone wrong, and what do you do?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Enterprise Captive
Answer
Short answer
Treat the paper list as the requirements document you never got. It is holding something the system cannot express - ordering by clinical worry, tasks with no order behind them, the sentence explaining why a patient is being watched - and the hazard is that it is private to one person.
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Likely follow-ups
- The list carries a sentence about a patient that the record has no field for. Where does that belong?
- How would you find the workarounds nobody has told you about?
- A consultant refuses to use the handover screen and briefs a junior verbally instead. How do you handle that?
- What evidence would make you conclude the paper list is right and the system should change to match it?
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