Stage 03

Execution

Keep the team producing working output and remove what blocks them.

PMBOK view

Directing work, managing the team, quality assurance, stakeholder engagement.

Agile equivalent

Iterations, daily stand-ups, reviews with real users, a visible board.

You are here if…

Work is happening but progress is hard to demonstrate.
The same blockers reappear week after week.
Status meetings are reporting theatre.

What to do

Make the work visible in one place

2 hours

One board, one source of truth. If you have three trackers, pick one and archive the rest this week.

Show working output every two weeks

Recurring

A demo to real stakeholders beats a status slide. It converts opinions into decisions.

Log decisions as they happen

5 min per decision

Date, decision, who decided, why, what was rejected. This is your single best defence against re-litigation.

Escalate blockers with a deadline

Ongoing

'I need an answer by Thursday or the milestone moves' — escalation without a date is just complaining.

This is the stage where most of my client work starts. Book a free 20-minute consultation — free, no obligation.

Where it usually goes wrong

The PM becomes the bottleneck for every decision.

Publish decision rights: what the team decides, what you decide, what the steering committee decides.

Stand-ups turn into status reports to the manager.

Change the question from 'what did you do' to 'what is in our way'.

Download and use now

Ready-to-use files from my own projects — no email required.

Requirement DocumentEpic → feature → user story → acceptance criteria in one sheet, with trace codes so nothing gets built on a verbal agreement.Excel workbook (.xlsx) · Fill it during scoping, then use the acceptance criteria column as the definition of done at review.Task List & Market Setup TrackerA working task log with type, priority, status, owner and a dated decision log — plus a market/setup overview sheet for rollouts.Excel workbook (.xlsx) · Run it as the single list in weekly delivery meetings; the log column becomes your audit trail for steering reporting.

Templates for this stage

Sprint & Delivery Cadence PlaybookPlanning, stand-up, review and retro agendas mapped onto PMBOK control.Decision Log & Change Request FormThe anti-scope-creep pair, with a built-in escalation path.

Next stageMonitoring & Control →

Work with me

Sometimes the fix needs a person, not a template.

I am Tigran Zakarian, a senior project manager with 13 years of end-to-end delivery for clients such as H&M Group, TV4, SEB and Clear Channel. I work on exactly the situations described across this site: rescuing drifting deliveries, setting up governance that people actually use, and facilitating the workshops that unblock decisions.

Projects & programmes

Interim / rescue project management
Programme & multi-team delivery ownership
PMO, governance and steering setup
Product ownership & backlog clarity

Workshops

Risk analysis workshops
Planning and prioritisation sessions
Decision and stakeholder alignment
Retrospectives that change something

Talks & training

Educational talks and keynotes
Hybrid PMBOK + Agile training
Kanban / flow ways of working
Team coaching for new PMs

Book a free consultation tigran.zak@gmail.com LinkedIn