Day 1 of INSIGHTS 2011 is in the books. Woven through the many and varied conversations today were comments about the amazingly motivational session by Afterburner. "Empower with Flawless Execution" was their theme and it resonated brilliantly with the entire audience at the event. 

"Flawless Execution" has four logical steps (Plan, Brief, Execute and Debrief) that form part of the continual service improvement lifecycle that drives culture, behaviors and most importantly targeted objectives.

After listening to Afterburner's "Lips" speak at both the event and the evening prior, it turned out that the topic that resonated with many of the attendees was "task saturation." Task saturation is common to all of us in IT where we often have more demand on us than other parts of the business. We all know that task saturation leads to mistakes, primarily as focus is lost from the target or the objective of the mission. Often I find that the objective in mind is often lost or not clarified or we have not thought through a plan for contingencies. One example that comes to mind is when an IT professional talks about their objective as implementing a framework such as COBIT, RISKIT, PMBok or ITIL, when their mission should be specific to the value proposition. For instance, the mission could be to implement an organizational risk assessment process to determine when to accept risk. Now along the implementation path if a missile is targeted at you and has "radar lock" if you don't take evasive action the outcome will not be pretty. It's the same thing in this case. Learning how to deal with the radar lock scenario is not one that you want to learn in battle. You will want to have leveraged the wisdom of those who have been successful before you and train.

One of my biggest challenges in the use of and implementation of best practices is that many in the industry do not want to learn from the past, think through contingencies or even understand the mission objective, leading to failure, rework and the business considering IT a failure.

I for one will leave this event with laser like focus on the objectives after planning, briefing, executing and then debriefing to understand what I can do to ensure "Flawless Execution."

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