Once you reach the Execution Stage, and you made yourself aware during Planning of all the potential risks that can bite you, it's time to focus on what is most critical. Now is the time to do that—because now you know (as a result of your planning work) what is most crucial. But it still takes discipline to ensure you don't go off-track and start to let noise creep in. This checklist, used daily or as needed, will help you keep your focus.

Checklist:

• As always, gather in your project planning work and findings so far.
• Create a comprehensive list of issues.
• Classify the issues and ingredients by level of importance and separate them into buckets–critical, important, unimportant.
• Label the critical and important as 'primary' and the unimportant as 'secondary.'
• Analyze the critical and important ingredients, plan your treatment of them, and determine possible responses to scenarios.
• Determine if your project plan is affected and, if so, go backwards and modify. 
• Share this with the project team and appropriate external players and stakeholders.
• Report to the client.

Lean Routine:

1. Unpack project investigation, conclusions, project plan    

In light of the goals and project knowledge so far, have you identified all the issues? For each issue, have you thought through and identified every ingredient within it that could come into play? These ingredients might be:

a. Factual matters, i.e., past facts or apparent facts, good and bad