We all make mistakes, sometimes lots of them. In a given day, how many times do you type something wrong? I’m guessing I make hundreds of such errors every day. But most of those mistakes are corrected almost immediately with the backspace key and then typing the correction. I don’t catch every mistake, but I probably catch at least 99 out of 100.

For those mistakes, the only cost is a few seconds of my time. As I am a pretty fast and accurate typist when compared with the average person, I’m not really costing myself. Where mistakes get costly is when they aren’t corrected early in the process.

A funny example of this was posted on our Facebook page yesterday. I’ve embedded that post below so you can see it and I’m guessing many of you will get a good laugh out of it. For those reading this post via e-mail, you’ll need to view it on the Web site to see the embedded post.

Now think how many people had to approve the design of this jersey for it to make it all the way through manufacturing to actually hang on a rack in a sporting goods store. Sure, it was probably produced outside of the United States by someone who knows nothing about the state of Ohio, a university located there or a basketball team playing for that university. Still, there has to be an approval process and this one really slipped through the cracks.

For whatever you create, what processes do you have in place to catch mistakes before they make it to a finished project? If you don’t have such a process, you probably should think about creating one. If you skip that step now, your work could be passed along on the Internet someday causing laughs from people wondering how your mistake wasn’t corrected.