Execution practices get the business ready. Most projects encounter issues of one kind or another. Some can be handled internally by the team. Some require breakthrough knowledge and behaviours to be successful. Most are subject to humans' ability to delude themselves that everything is OK, as well as the innate desire to keep quiet about problems encountered along the way.

Using a specific problem-solving team is a breakthrough behaviour that can help bring about a mind-set change. Separate from the teams responsible for delivering initiatives, this team is responsible for frequently reviewing all major projects, highlighting risks and issues, escalating the issues if not resolved, identifying the root causes and helping resolve the issues. This is a challenging role. Team members need to be culturally and politically savvy, strong communicators, technically able and possessing a deep knowledge of business processes.

Key success behaviours in deploying problem-solving teams include using well-rounded staff (as described above), rotating staff through the team to avoid the "us and them" syndrome, ensuring that the team is empowered to act and escalate quickly all the way to the top, ensuring that the team looks outside (at the market) as well as inside, and communicating the team's role clearly to everyone.

This approach is used successfully by Samsung SDS, the IT service provider in the Samsung group. Samsung SDS uses a 25-person-strong problem-solving team, called PPQA (Project Problem Quality Assurance) to ensure less than Six Sigma error level in any project. The 25 staff members are highly experienced, all with more than 20 years of IT experience. Members rotate through the PPQA team, staying one to two years.

The team investigates problems with IT-intensive projects. It first warns project managers, then has a right to convene the governance group, a 10-person committee including the CEO, CIO, CFO and CTO. They can ultimately take the problems to the CEO (relatively rare). When they spot a problem, they can request technical and business architects to be deployed onto problem projects. Samsung senior management estimate that 80 percent of IT-intensive projects deliver expected benefits.