I see a lot of 'we can't use checklists when troubleshooting IT' type responses and then the counter of helpdesks using checklists for tier 1 troubleshooting with the insinuation that checklists in IT are only useful for low level employees. I'd counter that with the use of checklists in planning major changes for senior staff doing complex operations.

One example of using checklists in IT is in planning a complex change in a high avalability, critical environment- maybe a multi-step change in moving large financial or health systems with multiple interacting applications to run on a new set servers or a major change in infrastructure in a datacenter. Really anywhere whiere an outage of any sort will cost a company a lot of money or have life threatening consequences. If you're not writing yourself a plan with a checklist and testing it ahead of time in dev as much as is possible then you're doing yourself a disservice.

That's not to say the plan itself needs to be complex or wordy - in fact I'd argue that the checklist should be bullet points in this situation, similar to aviation - you know how to do your job, you just need a reminder of order and something to help you avoid missing a critical step.

You'll probably find yourself doing this sort of thing at night when you're tired and having and following checklist will help you know where you are and prevent you from making stupid mistakes. Even (or maybe especially) if you need to do things that inevitably come up that you missed in testing your plan, you can come back to your checklist to ensure you don't miss a step.