From Chaos to Clarity: The Power of Issue-Driven Execution in High-Stakes Projects

I was once on a project with an incredibly tight end of year deadline and only a few months of runway to deliver.  A slip of even a day could have cost us the win.  As the Technical Execution Leader, I knew I couldn’t allow any issue with the potential to derail us fester.  The risk of assigning a key issue to the wrong person to resolve or to the right person but with the wrong approach could be the difference between meeting our deadline or missing it.

Our traditional forums for driving progress, like Agile Daily Scrums or Engineering Syncs, were necessary, but they weren’t sufficient to ensure success.  Those forums helped us raise issues, but they didn’t guarantee that we were assigning the most critical issues to the right people or following the right approach.  It was clear we needed something more.

So, instead of a status-based approach to managing progress, I kicked off an issue-driven approach to managing execution.  The issue-driven approach meant we determined, in real-time, which issues would be the most likely to derail our program and kept that list constantly up-to-date.  We then established a forum where we had the right people in the room to ensure those issues got the best resources with the best problem-solving approach to address.  Surfacing the most critical issues and then taking the best approach to address them every time was the “secret sauce” that was perfected throughout our brief three-month initiative. 

With this #IssueDrivenExecution focus, our project did meet our aggressive end of year goals.  More than that, the team had minimal unexpected fire-drills because we had established a process and a culture to surface issues before they became fire-drills.  The approach was so successful, I have used it in the dozens of initiatives I have led since then, and every time it has enabled us to better meet aggressive deadlines and work through ambiguity with focus and confidence.  Naturally, then, the Issue-Driven Execution training course was one of the first Online Courses I created.  I’m excited to share with others these techniques and approaches to manage through aggressive schedules and ambiguity.  If you take the course and apply the techniques, I’d love to know how it works for you.  Feel free to drop me a line and let me know how issue-driven execution performs in your environment!

Issue-Driven Execution - 4 step process